Aubaine is made by one person, Kori. Plainly put: there is neither the budget to commission illustrations nor the craft to draw them.
The illustrations are generated
The images that illustrate the trees, the equipment and the places come out of an image model. That is a choice, not an accident.
The other realistic option was stock imagery. A stock photograph shows what a catalogue already holds; a generated image can be steered towards what the text actually describes, that object, that light, that place. For a setting that exists nowhere else, the second one serves the reading better, and that is the only thing that settled it.
What this does not claim to be
Aubaine does not present itself as an AI art project. A generated illustration is a production constraint, openly stated, not a practice being claimed. The day the project can pay artists, it will.
What is not generated
The writing, the rules, the systems and the setting are made by hand. The book chapters, the skill descriptions, the balance values and the structure of the codex are written and arbitrated by a person, entry by entry.
What the files carry
An Aubaine image carries its author and its licence in its own bytes, and the licences page says which. The provenance markers left by the generating tool are stripped along the way: they described a local conversion rather than the work, and they did not survive the first resize in any case.