How Image Prompts Work
What DreamRunner writes for you, what you control, and where each part comes from
Before the technique pages, it's worth knowing what actually gets sent to the image model — because you don't write the prompt. DreamRunner assembles it, and you fill in specific parts of it.
What gets sent
For a character image, DreamRunner builds the prompt in a fixed order:
sex, species, physical description, mood, outfit,
subject & background, framing, content-safety wording
You cannot reorder that, and you don't need to. Which means the usual internet advice about "put the most important thing first" doesn't apply here — the ordering is already handled.
What you actually control
| Part | Where you change it |
|---|---|
| Physical description | Character slideover |
| Outfit | Outfit field on the character |
| Overall look | Menu → Styles |
| Framing and stance | Settings → Prompts |
| Subject and background | Settings → Prompts |
| Mood | Driven by the story |
So "writing a better image prompt" in DreamRunner really means writing better descriptions in two fields, and knowing which knob to reach for when something else is wrong.
One description in, two descriptions out
When you create a character you write a single Character Description. DreamRunner splits that into the two fields the image prompt uses — physical appearance and outfit — and writes each one in the right style for your image model.
Both are editable afterwards, and editing them is the reliable way to fix a character who keeps coming out wrong.
Note: the character's name is deliberately kept out of the image prompt. Names carry strong associations in image models and would drag the appearance around.
Why your descriptions look different depending on the style
DreamRunner writes descriptions in one of two dialects, and your style choice decides which:
- Styles built on Flux and similar architectures get prose — full sentences.
- Styles built on Pony, Illustrious, SDXL and similar get Danbooru tags — comma-separated labels.
You don't pick this. Change your style and the dialect follows automatically, which is why the same character can have a paragraph in one story and a tag list in another.
The next two pages cover writing in each dialect, for when you want to edit those fields by hand.
Quality tags are handled for you
If you've used Stable Diffusion elsewhere, you'll know the habit of prefixing prompts with
masterpiece, best quality, 8k or score_9, score_8_up.
Don't add those here. DreamRunner explicitly excludes them from generated descriptions, and each style already carries whatever its checkpoint needs. Adding them by hand just spends attention that could have gone on your character.