Whoosh! I'll try to post the six images on my FB with a link so you can see them. What I did was ask Grok about dust clouds as scouts might see them and try to "read" them. The cloud as seen by a scout is an objective fact, and I can hand a player an image and say THIS is what you see. Interpreting it is another matter. A warband of thirty braves, and four boys driving a remuda of thirty horses, look pretty much the same.
Here is what the robot told em:
Six cards cover it. More than that starts illustrating stories instead of shapes, and the shape is the only objective fact.
A scout did not get a different picture for "warriors" and "boys with horses." He got a plume, and the plume only varies in a few ways the eye can actually sort at horizon range: how tall it stands, how wide it lies, whether it is one body or broken into clumps, whether something dark shows under it, and whether it trails or spins in place.
Direction is not a seventh cloud. You turn the card, or mark the trail edge. Speed is mostly already in the shape — a boil versus a hang — so it does not need its own pictures.
Alkali and damp ground are modifiers you say aloud ("the ground is white; this would look bigger than it is"), not extra plates.
These six are the set. Same light, same rise, same distance, so the only thing that changes is the cloud.
1. Thread. Short, low, thin trail. A file.
2. Tall boil. Narrow column, high and leaning. Mounted and moving.
3. Broad hang. Wide, low, broken along the bottom. A spread herd at a walk.
4. Dark-fronted pall. Long, dense, yellow-brown, with a darker line at the base and no animals resolved. Heavy animals, or a large body running.
5. Broken clumps. Several separate puffs in a line, not one cloud. Wagons, travois, a village string.
6. Spinner. One column, no trail behind it. Wind, or something wallowing and not going anywhere.
That is the reasonable range. Cards 2 and 3 are the pair your misread lives in: a driven remuda and a war party swap places here, and a buffalo band can be called for the pall. The umpire keeps the key. The player only sees the plate.
link
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
