One of the most exciting things we do around here at Grailrunner is introduce new bits of the lore of our Salt Mystic setting in the form of Lore Cards. A fusion of art and short fiction, it’s an important mechanism for us to introduce and test these mini-expansions of concepts that will wind up ultimately as game cards or in the books or stories.

You can download any or all of the Lore Cards here at the Story Arcade.

A product we have heavily active in development right now is a bibliomancy-based oracle book for roleplaying in the Salt Mystic universe to be called The Augur’s Book Of Lots.

In order to bring that to life, all manner of new encounter types, new places, and historical figures and their stories are needed. It’s an incredible, life-changing experience for me personally to explore all that and watch it unfold like a big, crazy flower, and I can’t wait for you to see it. Seriously, this whole world is building itself and waiting for you to slide a ball lightning carbine on your arm and take a cautious step through the gates…

Today, we thought we’d introduce you to a new exciting, and sometimes terrifying, addition to the world of the Salt Mystic: the chimera.

The sneaky fellow leaping on our hapless narrator today is part man / part scorpion. In the oracle book so far, we’ve met countless hybrids like this already, though this particular combination freaks me out the most.

Download the new card here

As for the art, as always it’s a paintbash with the heavy lifting done in Photoshop. In this case, the bounty hunter, the skull on his hat, the backdrop, and the scorpion-man were all drawn from various iterations of Stable Diffusion or Wonder, with heavy correction and repair. I discovered the ‘puppet warp’ in Photoshop, which is my new favorite trick!

After compositing them together and color grading everything, I added some Stock nebulosity overlays from Nucly to make the diffuse smoke around the windows, blending them in Screen mode. The positioning of the scorpion-man was tricky – it made more sense for him to be creeping around behind our clueless bounty hunter, but the more I looked at him in mid-air, the creepier and more interesting I found it to be.

I wanted the skull on the bounty hunter’s hat to glow, so that along with the window glow was just some soft brush painting in Color Dodge blend mode.

Anyway, we hope you like the final product. Let us know what you think, and please check back periodically for updates on the stuff we’ve got cooking.

Till next time,