In school, I remember being taught pictorial narratives as a way to remember dates & definitions/basic facts, where we are told to convert words to pictures based on phonetic association & numbers to pictures based on visual association. For random lists, you assign a picture to each entry on the list & then link the whole list via narrative, the more ridiculous the narrative, the better.

Is this technique like a watered down version of the mind palace technique (which is supposed to be more powerful) or a completely different memory technique altogether.