Introducing new Lore Cards for the Salt Mystic setting is just awesome for me! Nothing brings the setting to life like a fusion of art and flash fiction, and this new one tied together a lot of things that have been stewing in my head for a while.
It’s called “Companions”.
Download it here, or access all the Salt Mystic Lore Cards for free by smashing the button below:
What is the background?
While writing the original novel that kicked off Grailrunner’s Salt Mystic setting, Tearing Down The Statues, I thought it would be a nice twist to have shaggy white silverback gorillas that gunslinging adventurers rode like horses. When it came time to actually introduce the concept though, on a whim, I wound up explaining that these wonderful beasts at one time, centuries ago, could speak. It always seemed a sad thought and something I’d maybe return to explore one day. I haven’t really dug that well yet, but maybe today’s scene scratches at that dirt.
So what’s happening in the story here then?
Why not read it? Just takes a couple of minutes. But just to give the flavor, the beast and rider are in the frozen wilds looking for an abandoned oriel gate to a lost pocket of artificial space where surely treasures and marvels lay forgotten. That isn’t the story though, as the title suggests.
How did the art come about?
I generated the base piece with AI, using variations of prompts relating to “shaggy white silverback” and “gunfighter explorer”. It was a low res square image but had the general layout I wanted. I corrected the snowy rock they’re standing on and removed some weird noise on the image, as well as another person standing there in a completely different scale.
The rider’s head was terrible, so I replaced it (after five tries) with another one, also generated in AI. That was tricky and had to be color graded and tweaked to fit.
Then I added the snow with an overlay in Screen blending mode. I just grabbed it off the internet (googling “snow overlay”). It was my first time making a snowy scene though, and I definitely learned the importance of scale for the snowflakes. My first few attempts looked like a blizzardy mess, but I laid a bunch of copies of the overlay down, tiling them across the image so the flakes would be smaller (and lowered their opacity, which was the real trick with this!).
Then, magic happened.
When I went into Illustrator to build the Lore Card itself, dropping the square image in didn’t look very impressive. With the previous Lore Card, I’d tried dropping the text directly onto the image for a magazine-look and thought I’d give it a go again with this one.
I needed a longer vertical image, with a dark, snowy rock in shadow at the bottom for white text.
Look at what Photoshop’s new “generative expand” feature did!
Sheesh, guys! What a time to be alive. Photoshop is incredible.
Anyway, I hope you take a look at the new card and that you enjoy it. Thanks for your time today. Have a great week.
“Interesting shapes” What in the world does that mean? (I’ll come back to that)
Our passion at Grailrunner is the imaginative process, any and every thing that can unlock new ways of creating mind-melting concepts and experiences with a bent towards speculative and fantasy fiction and images. We experiment with immersive storytelling in wargames, in roleplaying games, through a fusion of art and flash fiction, in novels, and in art prints.
On a personal level, as the guy generating practically all of that, I have to spend a ridiculous amount of time developing new skills. Recently, I’ve broken out the old sketchbook and Faber Castell pencils, bought a Pigma brush pen, and started going deep on Youtube with some modern day masters of the arts to get to a point where I’m not just painting in Photoshop over photobashed composites or renders from Daz Studio or Blender.
What’s the dream?
Because I love the awe and surprise of exploration, of not knowing what lies beyond a turn in the road, I’m hoping to get to a point where I can crack open a sketchbook and not just draw what I see, but generate something in simulated three-dimensional glory dredged from my imagination without knowing what I was going to draw when I sat down. Ideas from there would feed the hopper of more purposeful art images and concepts in the fiction and games. (I did this as a child and filled countless sketchbooks, but it was all 2-dimensional super heroes, heavy outlines, terrible shading, and nothing I’d be excited to show anybody).
Is that dream possible?
This little gem is called Sketching from the Imagination: Sci-Fi, by 3dTotal Publishing, and though it’s a few years old by this point, it will melt your face off if you’re at all into what I’m talking about here. There is some incredible talent in here. They’re doing it.
Also, these guys at ImagineFX (which is free on Kindle Unlimited now, if that works for you). One thing I especially appreciate about this magazine is the artists explain their desk setups, their materials and software, and their thought processes as they create.
What does all this have to do with “altered perceptions”?
It started with Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, actually. I bought a compilation of them in a used book store in Florida and perusing them, noticing he spent a lot of time talking about the importance of an artist developing their “mental library”. I forget what he called it, but the idea was to look at the world differently and actually notice things like how light falls on an object, how light reflects off the table, where exactly shadows fall. File all that away so you can draw on it in different contexts when you need it.
And there in one of the most influential art instruction books ever written, Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis, he made the same sort of point. One of the first exercises he suggests is to simplify multiple scenes at random and find the “flow” in them. He saw things in terms of basic curves, ovals, and swirls and something like a person just standing there, to Loomis, was a flowing curved line. It made it easier for him to represent it simply and beautifully on the page. Yet, it’s an entirely different way to see the world, which is my point today.
I’ve written here before about the visual power and intellectual punch of haiku. My hero in that world is an astounding 17th century genius named Matsuo Basho. This guy:
I’m reading (again) his poetry, this time in some translations by Andrew Fitzsimons, finding all kinds of new and striking illuminations there. One particular comment by Andrew caught my eye: he referred to Basho as one of the greatest “noticers” of literature.
“Noticers”
That struck me. Basho noticed things. Here:
The old pond
A frog leaps in
The sound of water
That’s his most famous one. For me, it’s not something I would pay a lot of attention to on my own, but just having him point this out – a little frog plopping in to a murky little pond, making that pleasant BLOP noise on a quiet morning – that’s just a relaxing and pretty thing now that I think about it. Basho points things like that out. He notices them and files them away for future contexts, including how it made him feel to see or experience it.
This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee with my wife and stared longer than I should have at a little mossy tree root that had made its way out into the brook, just thinking about this sort of thing. Today, I noticed the way the sunrise light filtered through a bright orange autumn leaf, making it almost glow. Crazy.
And then I found this guy, Kim Jung Gi. Please google him and watch and listen to a freakishly talented and wonderful human being! There are countless Youtube videos. Enjoy yourself watching him go nuts with a brush pen. Sadly, he passed away last year (and the world has lost something truly amazing).
He talked at length about how he looked at the world, things he noticed and filed away about how they look, how shapes curve, what geometries caught his eye, and the textures. Again, not things I’d pay attention to otherwise without someone pointing at it. We make mental shortcuts all day long – in fact, it’s how our minds work – and artists just focus their attention on things you and I might not because they know they’ll need those things later.
In my day job as a consultant focused on management behaviors and people interactions, that sort of thing plays into our daily lives practically every waking moment. One thing I do to explain that is ask an audience the color of the walls behind them or the pattern of the carpet. Nobody knows, and that’s my point. We’re shortcutting and letting information pass by us that doesn’t matter. We have to.
But what that means is there is untapped capacity to see things differently, to alter our perceptions.
And that leads us to Peter Han. This fellow, you need to meet.
Here’s his Instagram. Here’s his website. Here’s a demonstration of him just riffing on the paper. That’s him, grinning at you in the header image for this article, surrounded by some of his work.
He sees the world like this:
Peter has an inspiring story. He’s been drawing since he was 5, and had an extremely influential teacher when he was studying art (Norm Schureman). Norm apparently impacted him so much that, even with Norm gone now (shot in a senseless and tragic act), Peter has based his life’s work on some of the approaches he learned back then. He’s built a little empire of teaching people like you and me to model any scene at all in terms of basic shapes to get the structure and proportions and silhouettes correct. After that, it’s just shading and texturing, if not also color.
Here’s a sample of a wildly interesting book he’s written and illustrated he calls The Dynamic Bible. But you should really buy yourself the full copy available here.
What are we supposed to take away from all this?
Watch and listen enough to people like those guys highlighted in ImagineFX and Kim Jung Gi and Peter Han, and you’ll hear them talk about “interesting shapes” they encounter in their daily lives. They don’t just see a cricket, they see some fascinating geometry in its belly or legs that has something they appreciate about it. They don’t just see a sunbeam trickling through a dusty window onto a stairway landing, they see its fabric-like ripples and where it fades to one side but gets brighter on the other.
They may not just hear the frog jumping, but experience it more deeply and with more meaning than others.
My point is that’s the sort of untapped perception capacity we can all unleash, with a little focus and determination to do so.
A whole new way to experience the world! That’s what I’m getting at here. Something different and exciting to adventure with.
If life is a bit heavy these days, consider the starry-eyed wonder of the science fiction pulps of the 1930’s and 1940’s for a breath of clean air. One well I eternally find refreshing is Planet Stories, a pulp of substance that ran from 1939 to 1955 and which gave birth to many of the mainstream writers of the genre. Today, I want to bring you a low-key page turner of a short story from the Fall of 1944 that highlights the bold energy and high concept speculation typical of the time.
Welcome to Henry Kuttner’s The Eyes of Thar and our latest entry in the Pulp Gems series! (and yes, they misspelled his name on the cover)
Follow the link above to download the Fall 1944 Planet Stories (Kuttner’s story is on page 45), just to keep traffic flowing to the wonderful folks at the Internet Archive. Should you have any troubles with that, download it here.
She spoke in a tongue dead a thousand years, and she had no memory for the man she faced. Yet he had held her tightly but a few short years before, had sworn eternal vengeance – when she died in his arms from an assassin’s wounds…
I really think some of those zingers from the tables of contents back in the day were wonderful! This one caught my eye with its dense and compelling mystery summed in those few lines: how was Kuttner going to explain a lady who was dead returning at all, much less one speaking a thousand-year old dead language? And this illustration by Joe Doolin that accompanied it – I was hooked before I started. If you’re unfamiliar with Doolin’s work, read up on him here.
Henry Kuttner co-wrote (with his extremely talented wife, C. L. Moore), one of the first science fiction novels I ever remember reading: Earth’s Last Citadel. I almost hate to re-read that one now, just because I have fond memories of it from then.
Anyway, our tale for today swings right into the action:
“He had come back, though he knew what to expect. He had always come back to Klanvahr since he had been hunted out of that ancient Martian fortress so many years ago. “
Samuel Dantan is a bloodthirsty terror to those on ancient Mars who had killed his lover years ago, returning to kill them mercilessly between bouts in the spacelanes.
“When Dantan came back to Klanvahr, men died, though if all the men of the Redhelm tribe were slain, even that could not satisfy the dull ache in Dantan’s heart.”
Unfortunately, the tables have turned on him this time, and he’s being hunted. In fact, it’s while he’s desperately on the run that he encounters a mysterious artifact in a canyon that has been exposed by a landslide. Climbing inside, he finds it to be an ancient laboratory, buried under the stream for maybe as many as ten thousand years. Then, locked inside and hiding from his pursuers, a familiar voice calls for someone named “Sanfel”…
At first, it’s just her voice speaking in the dead language of old Mars. Dantan knows it because his grandfather was a shaman and used it for ancient rituals. It’s the voice of his dead lover, for sure, though the mystery woman has no idea who he is. She, too is being hunted by nightmare beast-men of her own foreign universe. And she’s just as desperate.
There are different physics in her world, not only slower time passage but also things such as light and thought work very differently. The weapons and aid that Dantan promises her should they open the doorway between worlds would be useless to her. So she says, though he’s ready to die trying. Sanfel so many centuries ago was following her instructions to build a weapon able to help, but he was long turned to dust.
“No, Dantan, you speak in terms of your own universe. We have no common ground. It is a pity that time eddied between Sanfel and me, but eddy it did, and I am helpless now. And the enemy will be upon me soon. Very soon.”
So her beastly enemies are at her door in an unimaginably faraway universe even as the vicious thugs of Redhelm are at Dantan’s own. Somehow, it’s his lover, and she needs him. What can he do?
*
I’ll let you pick the story up from there, just to avoid spoilers. It’s maybe a half-hour read at most. Definitely worth it. Kuttner’s always great, and this one was a fresh take on Burroughs’ old Mars.
Planet Stories never disappoints.
I hope you liked the referral on this one. If you have your own gems from the pulps, feel free to let me know.
Oh boy, has this been harder and infinitely more rewarding than I’d thought it would be!
A few months ago, we announced an exciting new project we’re working on at Grailrunner, expanding our Salt Mystic setting into tabletop roleplaying through a bibliomancy-style oracles book. The core idea is to provide a simple engine for exploring a fully realized science fantasy world with its rich history, colorful people and cultures, and the quirks and dangers of exploration contained in the covers of a book. The innovative twist on standard roleplaying oracles, which typically take the form of dice tables, is it will be constructed in a bibliomancy format.
We’re calling it:
I’m the guy writing it and it’s been life-changing. Seriously. I’ve had to stretch my imagination till it hurts to build out a realistic but fantastical world interesting enough to merit exploring and complex enough to come to glorious life for a solo player as well as for groups with a game master…all while avoiding contradictions with stories and materials we’ve already published.
What is bibliomancy?
It means foretelling the future by interpreting a random passage from a book.
How does that relate to roleplaying games?
In well-constructed roleplaying games like Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn or Starforged, there are layers of dice tables you consult to surprise and throw new encounters and situations at a player. Shawn is a master of this, providing a first impression of a person, then a name, then a more revealed aspect of their character as you get to know them. In Starforged, he provides similar layering for a star system, a planet seen from orbit, then more revealed aspects of settlements as you land your space ship and learn more. This randomness and immersion makes magic happen when you’re trying to avoid a blank page staring back at you (if you’re playing solo) or, worse, a table of players waiting on you to be creative.
More to my point today, he also provides “Action” and “Theme” tables intended to set the scene for a new area you’re exploring or some new situation your player is entering. They’re a bit vague but Shawn has described the marvelous imaginative process we follow in consulting tables like this as “creative interpretation”. What he means is you bring your own thoughts and ideas and filters to bear when you roll for these random descriptive words and make sense of them to drive the story forward.
Apologies if you see the I Ching as reflecting a deep reality but I do not and view the creative interpretation process as similarly at work figuring out what a hexagram has to do with a given situation.
So this new book will be a one-stop shop for a roleplaying adventure then?
Yes. I’m being careful to design for use with any roleplaying system (as people are a bit judgey about this) so it can just be an oracles supplement for other systems. However, there are some intriguing things you can only do with bibliomancy mechanics which make it necessary to provide very streamlined rules a solo player or game master can use without any other system (or even dice) at all!
What sorts of new things in the Salt Mystic setting will we see in this?
Wow, it surprises me every week! In another project (called Ruinwalker), we already had designed these massive naturally armored rhinos called “towerbeasts”, bio-engineered for ancient wars but still lingering about. Here, as towerbeasts pop up in various places it struck me that they didn’t have the kind of personality dragons do, jealously guarding piles of treasure and breathing white-hot flames.
So…
In Salt Mystic, we have all these abandoned gates to pocket dimensions of artificial space, inside which can be all manner of wonders. Suddenly, towerbeasts got taller in my imagination, and curious, fond of idly poking at and lingering about these gates. They might even jealously protect them, creating ugly encounters for adventurers looking to take a peek inside.
And I had them hiss lightning too, just to make it more interesting.
Fantastic! What else?
Oh, it’s something cool every week or so. My background imagination is always running on this. Let’s leave it for now.
OK, what is the creative process for this? What are your influences?
I wanted this to be on an epic scale, with shimmering cities in the distance and a long, rich history that gets glimpsed but maybe not exhaustively explained, giving the feeling of a world that’s existed a very long time and in which terribly and mighty things have happened. I’ve been rotating at random through several classic epics and transforming a randomly selected phrase into something that makes sense in this setting.
These, so far:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Ramayana
The Mahabharata
Greek mythology
Metamorphoses
Lucian’s True History
Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Dante’s Inferno
La Morte D’Arthur
The Aeneid
Beowulf
Gilgamesh
The Kalevela
Lugulbanda
Louis L’Amour books
The Persian Book of Kings
Arabian Nights
Parzival
Ring of the Nibelung
The Raghuvamsa
The Song of Roland
Pigafetta’s diary
The Lives of Saints
For example, if a phrase or encounter from a King Arthur story has a betrayal and a virtuous knight, I’ll keep the betrayal and turn the knight into a famous carbine gunslinger. Magical objects become abandoned & mysterious machines.
I’ve also recently started flipping to random pages in ImagineFX magazines and to interesting images on Artstation for inspiration.
What about the game mechanics?
I’ve spent a lot of time researching the best mechanics of various games to translate into a bibliomancy implementation. For exploration, there isn’t a game system better than Free League Publishing’s Forbidden Lands. I’ve taken a spark from them and eliminated dice and the map but tried to keep the general feel of how they treat encounters, story fragments, inventories, and experiences while exploring.
Right now, I’m trying to crack the code on a combat mechanic that doesn’t involve clueless bashing and smashing to grind down hit points. I’m super intrigued by an old, out-of-print game called Riddle of Steel, which contains an innovative and brutal set of rules for realistic combat simulation.
I’ve recently gotten touch with the designer of the game, a fantastic guy named Jake Norwood. We’ll be chatting later this month (I’ll write up the interview for our Inspirational Creator series). Hopefully, I can streamline from the spark of what he has there into something easy but with similar tactics and feel that leverages my format.
Anyway, I just wanted to celebrate a bit and catch everyone up on what’s happening here. I’m targeting 60k words for the text of this, a middling sized novel word count. When I crossed 30k words this week, I felt like cheering. It’s fun, but a real stretch.
I hope this intrigues you, and that you’re okay getting the occasional update as things evolve. Till next time,
Grailrunner Publishing 