If this is your first time visiting Grailrunner, we make games, art, and fiction mostly set in our signature IP, a western-themed science fantasy roller coaster called Salt Mystic. In 2021, we published a tabletop skirmish game with the curious notion of telling stories with it.
Our original manifesto for the game included these three guiding principles:
- Make the characters come alive. Combine gorgeous card artwork with gameplay mechanics that reflect who the characters are and why their stories matter.
- Give the battles a bigger story. Create an overarching narrative that explains who’s fighting, why, and what the consequences might be whichever side wins.
- Give everything a history. Every character, weapon, and vehicle has a backstory. Even the scratches on a cannon barrel came from somewhere.
We’re talking 8, maybe 10 years ago when I first really started thinking through how to do all that. And the first real in-game story came about in September of 2019. I wrote about that in an update on game development here. It was these guys:
Who are those two?
In the Salt Mystic lore, there are stories able to travel and affect the world on their own, hopping from mind to mind and even possessing people. Some are able to raise a guardian for that generation, uniquely suited with the character and charisma to change the world. Helion and Stratica were brothers living in an old shack as boys shivering on a winter evening when a mysterious hag visited their door, offering that one of them would be this generation’s guardian.
Only one of them.
I remember chuckling at how ridiculous it was to have a game mechanic where if the players put these two cards onto the table at the same time it plays havoc with the rules and starts a timer that just trashes the entire game if you don’t force these two to confront each other. I still love that, having a meta-story hovering over the game and over the background narrative.
There have been others but it struck me recently as I was refreshing the artwork for the game that there’s another meta-story building on its own that made me want to write this post.
Really? What’s that?
This card here represents one of my favorite characters in the Salt Mystic setting. I have a long history with her and have struggled mightily to refine the artwork over the years to match the picture in my head.
She calls herself The Wake.
With virtually every cityscape and terrain saturated with sensors and computing power, there is a ubiquitous internet called the Datastream where someone who knows how to use it can see and hear almost anything anywhere. She mastered it like no one else and brings incredible battlefield knowledge. Her game mechanic forces the opposing player to reveal cards at crucial moments.
What’s funny is how she came to be in my mind though. There was this girl on a plane in Oakland.
Are you being creepy?
No, but hear me out. This goes back to maybe 2016 or so. I was sitting on a plane waiting for everyone else to board. I noticed this lady standing at her seat as folks jostled by, 3 or 4 seats ahead of me. She was wearing a thin cotton blouse and a loose cotton pants, with part of a red dragon tattoo visible on the back of her neck. I saw the bottom of the tattoo on her lower back and the shade of it even through her blouse. Jet black hair and this audacious, stunning tattoo.
If Grailrunner teaches you nothing else, please remember what Thomas Edison said, “To invent, all you need is an imagination and a pile of junk.” I filed her away and came back to her years later when I needed an interesting look for a new character. That tattoo extending across a pretty woman’s entire torso struck me as a great idea.
Here’s ten years of trying to make her look like I thought she should:
I told you a couple of weeks ago about my unfortunate addiction to Blender‘s 3d software at the time of all this. These original versions started in Daz Studio, with some hair and kitbashed clothing I’d picked up. I built the weapon in Blender out of a squashed cylinder with some textures and more kitbashing. Then I added some random backgrounds and mixed things up in Photoshop.
I definitely found gold when I learned you could stack png images onto the skin textures directly in Daz Studio and give your characters tattoos. I mean, that was just gold! If you ever wonder why so many Salt Mystic folks have elaborate tattoos, it’s because I learned how to do that in Daz and got carried away.
Blame it on the dragon lady in Oakland too, I guess.
Why are you telling us about her now?
Well, you may know we’re refreshing all the game art, the rulebook and tuck box for the Salt Mystic wargame. The proofs arrive Friday so we’ll hopefully go live next week if everything looks okay. If it doesn’t, we’ll delay to get everything right. I was writing a new lore card that sets the scene for a possible game scenario to go out in tandem with the relaunch.
Here at Grailrunner, we host a feature called the Story Arcade, where you can find illustrated flash fiction that helps us build out the Salt Mystic setting and its lore. They’re called “lore cards”. You don’t have to read these to know what’s going on but it’s another way to step inside. They’re usually a single page, something you can read in a minute or so.
In her case, I wanted to do something different and offer something more than flash fiction with multiple illustrations included. The header image for this post is one of the illustrations and – I must say – she’s looking better these days.
You may also know I’m 60,000 words in to a new novel set in the Salt Mystic universe to be titled “Mazewater”. I know it’s been forever since I started on that but I’m working on it – believe me! It struck me as I was imagining this fellow, Auroch beside her in the story (and in that header image) that it’s the same guy as one of the characters in my novel.
Same guy, running from her. In love, but not really. Kind of afraid of her, if he’s being honest.
You’re crazy. How does that impact a game you’ve already designed?
Well, it doesn’t. But it probably affects what happens to him in the novel. Now, as I’m refining the endgame plot, I need to think about how she’ll react if he dies or if he doesn’t…if he goes back to her, or if he keeps running.
And I think I know what will be more interesting…
*
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring to you today – just a little background on the random quirks and twists of the imagination that wind up making it into print and onto the tabletop. At least in my case.
Keep an eye us for the commemorative stl file if you feel like having The Wake on your desk. we’re close to done with this, though that hair is giving us fits in making it look cool but work on a 3d printer.
Till next time,
