Grailrunner is excited to announce the latest addition to our growing Salt Mystic Lore Card set: a mood-setting, rousing vignette titled “Canyon Of Living And Dying”. Download it for free here.
Welcome to the Grailrunner Story Arcade!
Salt Mystic is our rapidly growing western science fiction setting, upon which we’re building everything from novels to games and merchandise. You can learn more about that here. Key to this innovative new way of exploring immersive storytelling is the idea of worldbuilding through a collision of art and fiction. Sometimes the art comes first, then a story is built around it. Sometimes, a story idea percolates and only starts popping after an image is crafted for it.
However it happens, we’re building out locations and settings, characters and background lore, all through experiments and inspirations that often get shared for free on social media and here on the Grailrunner site. The hope is that those of us out there who dream of adventure and exploration, of new worlds and intriguing concepts, we’ll all find a home here! And that you’ll buy books and stuff.
Definitely buy the books and stuff.
The Story Arcade is also a place for people playing the Salt Mystic tabletop wargame to find interesting settings for the battlefields they play upon. That’s where this week’s addition was born, actually.
What was the inspiration for this?
Writing this article here, I was reminded of a really well designed dungeon adventure that appeared in a Wizards Of The Coast compilation titled Ghosts Of Saltmarsh.
Spoiler alert – there is a point in this adventure where the very dungeon setting itself (a ship) starts sinking and flooding. The dungeon destroys itself, and you have to get your characters out or drown. And to me, that’s incandescent genius! I became enamored with the idea of a battlefield setting for the Salt Mystic game where the battlefield floods or sinks or catches fire or otherwise starts snuffing out characters not fast enough to survive.
Generally, I haven’t solved how to convert that to a Salt Mystic terrain book yet. Maybe one day. But one of the ideas that didn’t pan out as I thought about it was a high canyon where the battle was to be fought on crumbling rock walls. I imagined a giant stone golem at the base throwing boulders up at the armies and snatching random people away. It sounded cool, but game rules and art to make that work just didn’t click for me.
This image is what came of all that. I had the picture of a carbine gunslinger nervously clinging to a high rock wall with a derelict in the mist behind him, precariously perched in an inaccessible place.
What was the process to create the image?
Like most of the imagery I produce, this is a photobash of several elements composited together in Photoshop and painted over. The carbine weapon strapped to his hip is something I generated in Blender, but re-textured recently. The climber is a composite of two AI-generated elements and a handful of stock images, run through a filter in Photoshop and color and light graded to match. The background is a composite of two AI-generated landscapes from two different pieces of software, and I used two overlays from Nucly for lighting effects.
What about the story?
I rewrote that three times, trying to give it a western feel. The idea is a dude from a rinky-dink town in the middle of nowhere deciding that the fear of climbing up there is not as strong as his need to really live, to maybe make a name for himself. Or maybe to solve the mystery of what’s inside that derelict.
In the story, he says “to live is to burn”. I totally stole that from Harlan Ellison, who said he stole it from an Egyptian papyrus. Whoever said it first, it’s awesome.
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Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new Lore Card. Shoot me a comment or note if you’d care to chat it up about Salt Mystic or where we’re going with all this.
If you’ve never heard of the Troika! roleplaying game, I have a real Scooby snack for you today! As part of our Inspirational Creator Series of interviews, we’ve met with artists, writers, and game designers who break exciting new ground in innovation and imagination.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you some insights and musings from Daniel Sell, who is not only Director of the Melsonian Arts Council game publishing company, but is also one of its most talented and mind-expanding creators! Just to whet your appetite a bit on that, let’s quote their mission statement:
The Melsonian Arts Council exists to publish table top adventure and role-playing game books unlike anything the medium has on offer. To that end we help artists and writers on the bloodied edge of their craft produce beautiful books while helping readers discover this wide, bright world of independent games they never thought possible.
Come on! That’s awesome, right?! Anyway, welcome back to Grailrunner’s Inspirational Creator Series!
Daniel, you’ve said that you run the Melsonian Arts Council as a way to write games without having anyone tell you what to do while you do it. That’s quotable, just so you know, and maybe tells us a bit about your personality. The fresh and innovative approach you and your team are taking with works like Acid Death Fantasy, The Big Squirm, and Troika! are an inspiring breath of clean air in an industry that gets a little hung up on armored dwarves, dragons, and license restrictions.
Thanks for making time for us!
I’m always happy to talk about myself.
Q. Beyond the obvious fact that you have to make games people will buy, what sorts of projects inspire you the most? Is it the game mechanics, the subject matter, the twist on expectations…what makes you smile when you think about spending that kind of effort and time on making a new game?
The thing that sets me on fire is a project that is relentlessly sincere. A major problem with roleplaying game books is that they’re almost always products before they’re anything else, which sends sincerity right out the window. I want books to rip off the mask of best practices and boring choices and let us see what you really wanted to make.
Q. You’ve talked before about things like D&D’s Planescape boxed set as an inspiration for you, imagining a multiverse that maybe lost some of its magic when you were older. Tell us about what sorts of games, books, or films made that magic for you back in the day and what they did right.
0e and 1e D&D were pretty solidly magic, 2e had a spark of it. Really, lots of games from the 80s and early 90s had a lot of magic to them. They were wild, silly, huge, beautiful and diverse, there were multiple large companies with money making bold choices and beautiful books. Palladium are still at it, and I have an unironic admiration for Uncle Kev and his Glitter Boys et al. (Meet them here) As for books and films, I don’t have much nostalgia for what I consumed back then, it was too hard to find good things before the internet. I still have and love my collection of Fighting Fantasy books, which are almost all immensely bold and idiosyncratic adventures that I love immensely. Something about dungeon merchants and weird things waiting for you to find them just gets me going.
Q. It’s one thing to have cool ideas about games, but quite another to design and publish Ennie award winning works for yourself at your own publishing house. How’d that happen?
I’m not sure. I started publishing when I saw a guide on a blog explaining the method by which one could assemble a zine at home by hand and I thought that looked fun. All I needed was a zine, so I wrote one. I took an adventure I had run in my home game, tidied it up, and published it as The Undercroft #1. Then I had to do a second one. A big part of the joy of RPG writing is the necessary collaboration that is involved, so I started asking around and working with people I knew and respected in the scene. Over the ten issue run I oversaw I met people who had ideas too big to go in a zine so I decided to make a book instead. Like with every other step, I asked around, talked to people doing the thing I wanted to do, and then did that. From there the world opens up a lot, with crowdfunding and trade publishers and shipping and so on. It continues to open up.
Q. In ‘Letters Of JRR Tolkien’, the professor is quoted as saying:
“Part of the attraction of Lord Of The Rings is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.”
French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé said, “To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.”
You said in Troika! “Players travel by eldritch portal and non-Euclidean labyrinth and golden-sailed barge between the uncountable crystal spheres strung delicately across the hump-backed sky.”
What’s that all about?
This is true. Part of the impetus to writing Troika! was a disappointment with Planescape. Growing up I had an incomplete smattering of the core books, leaving massive holes in the thing. They suggested infinite worlds of exciting and absurd wonder in little paragraphs here and there between DiTerlizzi artworks. As an adult I bought more books and it turned out that Tolkien was right, the distant towers were made of cardboard. So I now only fill in the bits I want to fill in, and feel I can fill in while maintaining the tension of a world greater than we can take in with one sweep of the head. I never want to lose that sense of discovery again.
Q. What’s a hump-backed sky though?
The humpbacked sky is an English translation of a French translation of a Greek translation of the term that usually gets translated as “vault of the heavens”. I prefer humpbacked sky because it is more literal and also less easily skipped over, forcing you to think about it rather than going “yea yea vault of the whatever”. So it is the undulating heavens between the spheres.
Q. Troika! offers a marvelous parade of character types players can become or encounter. But we need to talk about the rhinoman. Tell me about the rhinoman.
I can’t take credit for the rhinoman. I took it from a picture in The Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson, a Fighting Fantasy book I read a lot as a child. The image is so bluntly weird and has haunted me ever since. So I thought everyone else should experience it as I did.
Q. I need to geek out a second. You’ve mentioned M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series as one of your inspirations. I sometimes think I’m close to getting him to agreeing to an interview because those stories have been lifechanging for me personally. What’s your take on that collection?
I love them. I came to them late, after Troika was already written, but they solidified an idea I was unable to grab. The Viriconium stories create their own canon, in a way. The first book is quite a normal fantasy adventure, then it just gets weirder and weirder. The future books use the original books words to summon up complex allusions that only make sense in the context of a Viriconium book. Intensely self referential, like a Gene Wolfe novel but spread over a shorter distance. It’s how I approach the weird of the world now, in layers that people can uncover. Impenetrable non sequiturs is easy, and boring. I want to know that there is a trail back to meaning somewhere, even if it’s hard to find. Just knowing is enough.
Q. Can you describe your process for creating – whether the writing or the game mechanics?
It depends if I’m laying down new work or working on a draft. If it’s new then I wake up and sit in front of a notebook for 4 hours and see what comes out. If it’s a draft I do it in front of a markup word processor because I can’t be trusted with distractions. When writing I limit my reference books since they can become distracting in their own right. I have a book of the names of Catholic saints, a few different books about interesting words, and one or two books of poetry, scripture or product images. The large books are used like divination, when I’m stuck I’ll pick one up and open it at random to see what comes out and use that. The fun part is making that oracle weave in to what you’re doing neatly. I find that process creates a kind of verisimilitude that can’t come from sitting down and making stuff up out of thin air. Going back to Planescape, one of my issues with it is the apparent ease with which they can describe an infinite realm with infinite variety. With this cut-up method we get a taste of real culture, that fractal variance of real life. It’s impossible to make from just one head.
Q. You’ve launched the hardboiled RPG adventure, The Big Squirm quite recently. Anything new you’re working on now is super-secret, but what CAN you tell us about any projects coming out soon?
We’re very busy. I have a few books of my own coming soon; Slate & Chalcedony is a deceptively normal adventure to beat up a wizard in a wizard tower which goes back to my horror roots; Get It At Sutler’s is a (huge) tool for letting your players work a job at a fish market where they can meet people and experience the city of Troika like a native; and I’ll probably have a layer of a Troikan mega dungeon out before that. Otherwise we have another Troika adventure by Andrew Walter, a D&D campaign boxset sequel to Crypts of Indormancy, 2nd editions of Fever Swamp and Fungi of the Far Realms, a Troika based superhero RPG by Christian Kessler, a Dickension burglar RPG by Luke Gearing, and some others I’m probably forgetting. Busy year.
Q. What kind of pitches are you looking for from aspiring writers, artists, or designers right now?
We’re looking for books now. We have a project which we hope to get people involved in creating short adventures set in the city of Troika. Link here for the full brief.
Q. Where can we find more about what you and the Melsonian Arts Council are up to?
www.melsonia.com is the best place to find new things, but we also maintain a stubborn presence on social media for anyone who likes that sort of thing.
Times are tough and getting tougher for everyone, the RPG industry feels overwhelmingly tight and the only people who survive are the rich and the stubborn. Be stubborn and make games, please.
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Daniel, I can’t stress enough how much your approach and your philosophy towards inspiration and the creative process send us over the moon! Thanks so much for the breakthrough work you and your team are doing at Melsonian Arts Council, and especially for the long nights and brain-wracking I’m sure it took to deliver something as mind-bending as Troika! You’re bringing new and good things into the world – we need many more people like you!
Thanks again for making time for us. Best of luck with the blizzard of new products coming. Have a great year!
Grailrunner Publishing is excited to announce the second art print we’re making available at our online store, introducing a thrilling new setting within our ever-growing Salt Mystic universe! Welcome to Crystal Spheres Oriel.
Outside the Central Remnants and far beyond the eastern Shifting Wilds where computronium-infused dunes and caverns have gone mad…where only the bravest few have travelled and returned with impossible stories of spaceships and cities among the asteroids…lies the ruined spaceport leading to Crystal Spheres Oriel.
You may have seen glimpses before:
To celebrate this new addition to our setting, we’re offering a new art print in the online Grailrunner Store, a stunning 18″x24″ poster format print of an ion sailship opening a new asteroid mine. Click the image to learn more!
We sincerely hope you will join us in celebrating this opening of a new world of possibilities for storytelling!
In honor of a Dungeons & Dragons movie being released that isn’t terrible (Honor Among Thieves – not perfect, overall fun, go see it to encourage more of that), we thought we would point out some free stuff that you can go grab for your own tabletop adventuring. Enjoy!
What was Dungeon Magazine?
TSR was the original home of Dungeons & Dragons, and throughout their history they maintained two periodicals appropriately named respectively Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine. The Dungeon variety especially warms my heart because it’s practically entirely free on the internet now, and because of the liveliness of its Letters section where some of the most creative and insightful people who ever braved a dungeon debated and tossed ideas about. It ran from 1986 to the end of its print run in 2007 and ceasing altogether in 2013.
I’ve written before here about the important explorations and inspirational content of letters columns. In that case it was the early pioneers of science and speculative fiction in periodicals like Amazing Stories and Planet Stories where those dudes not only helped shape the genre itself, but went on to change the world later in life. And they were largely driven by the ideas and fascinations they found in those magazines. With Dungeon Magazine, it feels much the same to me perusing those missives for recommended modules, suggestions on how to improve storytelling and engagement, and especially to hear what elements attracted them (and which didn’t).
What kind of things did Dungeon Magazine include?
Anybody at all could submit their own adventure modules, in essentially whatever D&D setting they liked. Even Spelljammer makes its appearances, which if you’ve been around here at Grailrunner for any length of time you’ll know is dear to our hearts! Go see this if you don’t know what I mean. Seriously, just grab an adventure that hooks you, clarify any stats you need to for whichever version of the game you’re playing, and go to town!
How did you pick these as the top ten?
Personal preferences abound here – I like a strong narrative element with some kind of twist or innovation, particularly interesting elements to interact with or strong NPC characterization. Locations with some solid, novel development are intriguing to me. Twists on established lore are a plus! I can’t imagine I would ever just play one of these as written, so the inspiration for me was to steal cool ideas for my own adventures, as any good dungeon master should. Extra attention was given to dungeons mentioned more than once in the letters column.
In this adventure, you and your companions have sailed to the trading port of Sandbar to find the elven crafts and wine of which you’ve heard such stories. Unfortunately, the port is in ashes when you arrive, still hot and smoking from the marauding attacks of a “tall black warship of alien design”, that had laid waste to the town in “a hail of destructive magic and incendiary missiles”. The magic-using baron in charge of the town asks for your help bringing these marauders to justice, as through divination he’s learned they are a few miles away in port for repairs.
What’s great about it?
Although the module explains in detail who the attackers are, why they did it, along with everything you need to know about the captain and crew, the mystery and intrigue of their identities and motives fascinates me imagining myself as player. I especially like the blend of nautical adventure and spellcasting, and the stages of this adventure highlight that. The story advances to a climactic boarding of the warship, which seals the deal for me, particularly with the line among the instructions to the Dungeon Master (which I don’t really think is a spoiler here): “If the PCs can somehow manage to capture the Dama Rosa intact, they will have acquired a priceless treasure.”
Now that’s an idea!
#9 Palace In The Sky by Martin & John Szinger in Dungeon 16
Livestock and people have gone missing in the night near the city you’re visiting, leaving traces of the footprints of giants. Strangely though, the footprints begin and end abruptly defying all logic. A fortnight ago, an elven hero tried to bring the mystery to light but died soon afterwards. His enigmatic message sent by pigeon read only “Seek the palace in the sky.”
What’s great about it?
A cloud island to explore with its landing dock, and areas of the cloud called “insubstantial cloudstuff” where you might fall entirely through should you misstep. A detailed cloud castle and dungeon peopled with marauding giants. You have to navigate all that, but the module warns in the beginning that it “isn’t a simple hack-and-slay expedition. It also involves diplomacy and wit; if the PCs attack everything in sight, they may be destroyed.”
I’m a bit of a sucker for airships and floating adventures. This one had me at “palace in the sky”.
You’re in the mighty city of Beryl, founded a thousand years ago with its great university, and now a hub of human and elven commerce. The arch-chancellor of the university recently died, and the city is rumbling with rumors and intrigue from the politics of naming his replacement. The half-elf chancellor of the College Of Antiquity reveals to you an ancient mystery signaled by a hidden map and scraps of phrases concealed in the padding of an old shield hanging on his wall. Perhaps you and your companions can follow the clues and discover what happened to elven king Thiondar so many years ago in a mysterious valley…
What’s great about it?
Many of the encounters can be deadly, and to simply bash your way through will get you killed. I really like that about this one. Some wit, a willingness to retreat, and finding clever things to do is the best way to approach the adventure. I especially appreciate the lore-heavy narrative elements hinted at in the beginning, then strung along as you follow the clues. That valley has some terrible and mighty magic and beasts awaiting you. Tread carefully…
You are travelling alone in the frozen wilderness, looking for some kind of shelter from an oncoming winter storm. It’s going to be a bad one. When you stumble into an open glade and smell wood smoke, you think you’ve found a welcome place to hide out till the storm passes, a fortified trading post in the middle of nowhere called Jacob’s Well. There are a few other guests there, and as you will learn, one of them has brought a deadly affliction inside the fort that may consume you all…
What’s great about it?
It’s rare for an adventure module to be intentionally designed for a single player and a Dungeon Master, but this contributes to the intentional paranoia and claustrophobia engineered into this dark, creepy ride. It’s basically the movie, Aliens, set in a D&D wilderness. There’s advice in here on how to build a sense of dread and for jump-scares. Definitely a great adaptation of the movie trope to the game.
You and your companions have arrived in the run-down port city called The Styes. Once a metropolis and marvelous ocean gateway, with dancing statues and impossible towers, constructed of marble on a man-made island, The Styes now lies practically in ruin. What’s left of the place is gripped in the fear of murders committed by a mystery figure they’ve dubbed The Lantern Man. In the hushed whispers among the alleyways, there are rumors of a Kraken and weird dreams centered on the weed-choked sea. Hopefully, you’ll survive long enough to puzzle out what nightmares are at work in this ruined place…
What’s great about it?
This is basically Cthulhu for D&D. That should be enough to say. Krakens can’t miss with me. Put a Kraken in the story, and I’m in. Add creepy murders, rumors of an underwater city, and a conspiracy of silence with the looming atmosphere of dread…this one is a slam dunk if any of that sounds cool to you.
#5 The Ghost Of Mistmoor by Leonard Wilson in Dungeon 35
You and your companions arrive at the lonely village of Mistmoor, drenched from weeks of rain in this part of the countryside hunting for dragons. A local family fell into ruin years before, and its current young scion is embroiled in debts for some indiscretions with a duke’s daughter. He’s desperately in need of unlocking the mystery of his inheritance, which vanished into history in a terrible tragic series of murders and suicide in the family manor. Let’s hope terrifying spectres and encounters in the middle of the night don’t spook you too much, because you’re going inside, where nightmares and abominations await you…
What’s great about it?
The encounters with various ghosts are well structured, triggered with the timing and mechanics. I like the backstories and defined nature of the ghosts especially, and the encounters are well integrated with the architecture. There is a genius mechanism here provided for the Dungeon Master to create a sense of dread and wild shock that I really don’t want to spoil. Check out pages 55 and 56 to see what I mean. It’s a great, fun spook-fest with plenty of atmosphere and would make for a great time at the table.
#4 Kingdom Of The Ghouls by Wolfgang Bauer in Dungeon 70
You and your companions are following rumors of the taking of mountain strongholds by terrifying creatures who have risen from beneath the earth. Hushed whispers from the few survivors tell of a mighty empire growing in The Underdark caverns, with vile beginnings from a spell gone bad years before that summoned a powerful ghoul named Doresain who stepped from the eldritch portal to either eat or convert the mages to his will. They’re coming to the surface now, to grow their dominions and to destroy anything in their way. You’ll need to be brave and bring torches. You’re going underground!
What’s great about it?
A region of deep caverns, of strange races, ancient civilizations, and lost magic. This one’s a keeper for atmosphere and for something different than your ordinary imperiled village or stone dungeon. I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but there are intentional opportunities among the encounters underground to ally with enemies of the wicked ghouls and form an army of your own. And I’m not sure you can make it out of there alive without an army! I consider the different locations provided, the details and architecture defined in this module, and the robust characterizations and NPCs herein as a master class in a good adventure module. You really should give this one a try!
You and your companions have been hired by the Silvery Moon Vault Of Sages, to find the ruins of an old library and recover any magical tomes therein. Once a temple that fell in a terrifying schism years before overrun by a horde of undead, the library is believed to contain powerful books worth your risking your life there. And that’s very much what you’re doing. Zombies and snakes, giant snakes and centipedes, trapped spellbooks, and crawling claws are waiting in the shadows, though a much more sinister and bewildering threat than any of those beckons as well…a threat from the architecture of the ruined library itself!
What’s great about it?
This is a spoiler big-time, so if you’d care to remain surprised about it, skip this paragraph entirely. It’s pretty awesome, even as a Dungeon Master honestly, though a player could really his mind blown trying to puzzle this one out. Each room is an 80′ x 80′ square with a 20′ foot ceiling, and a starting configuration is provided for the DM. However, at regular intervals, the rooms shift. Mechanics for how to determine the room moves are provided, based on a D4 roll, and it’s silent to the players. They’re faced with trying to find a particular the pages of a particular book to gain control of this madness, which is complicated by the fact that certain creatures from the Nine Hells are bound into the pages of certain books to protect them. Honestly, this mechanic of room shifts is just amazing innovation! I give it third place just from the audacity and novelty of it.
#2 Salvage Operation by Mike Mearls in Dungeon 123
You and your companions have been hired by a down-on-his luck former trade captain whose flagship vessel, the mighty Emperor Of The Waves, which was lost in a storm (and actually turned into a temple by cultic orcs). Its loss ruined him, and he’s desperately hoping you can investigate and regain some of the magical items that were lost with the ship. It may be his only chance to regain his glory, a glory you might be able to share if you’re successful. You’ll be exploring ruined upper decks, slowly descending into the depths of the mighty ship in a nautical dungeon crawl where the compartments are flooded with seawater and infested with the undead. Yet time will become you biggest threat of them all.
What’s great about it?
Again – spoiler on this one. If you’d like to be surprised, you probably shouldn’t be reading some of this. This one’s an easy entry for my top 3 just because I’m enamored with the idea of a dungeon destroying itself slowly as the players race to escape. And once the players are down in the holds, deep in the dark lower levels where there is only cold seawater, choking weeds, and zombies, you realize the ship is sinking. One by one, the compartments flood leaving the players to desperately cast about for a way out. And that’s when the giant squid appears. Come on! That’s genius!
#1 Maure Castle by Robert Kuntz and Gary Gygax in Dungeon 112
Before you lies the enormous, deadly, bewildering Maure Castle. The promises of treasure lie within, but generations of treasure seekers and adventurers have stood where you’re standing and thought what you’re thinking. It’s a maddening, twisting beast of a castle full of images that come to life, attacking fish, an iron golem, cultic demon worshippers, and a lunatic mage. Yet it’s in the lowest levels of this mighty, megaplex of a castle where it is said dark secrets of power lie in the shadows, and where a resurrected demon-handed man searches for them. It’s best you find them first…
What’s great about it?
This one would be number one for the sheer history of it – the origins of Maure Castle lie in a pre-commercial campaign Kuntz and Gygax worked on before Dungeons & Dragons existed, and formed the seed for what became the Greyhawk setting. And Gygax – he’s devious and clever with traps and overall audacity in trying to kill the players. He must have been working overtime with this one. It’s just stuffed with weird encounters and lore and has enough to keep adventurers busy and scheming for session after session. In fact, the adventure takes up the entire issue!
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That’s what I wanted to bring you today! It was a lot of fun digging through these, and I’m glad to have this list and the respective links in one place for my own reference. There are some amazing ideas in here! I can’t promise that I’ve reviewed every dungeon in this wonderful lost magazine, but these gems stood out for me on first pass.
I hope you enjoyed this, and that you get inspired for whatever creation you might be working on.
Grailrunner Publishing 