Grailrunner Publishing is an indie publisher that blends fiction, games, original art, and apparel into a unified vision of 21st century storytelling. It explores imaginative worlds and striking visual design, with a focus on turning bold ideas into tangible experiences. Our passion is the creative process itself, and everything we do, every story we tell, is designed to be high-octane fuel for the imagination.

The origin story

My name is Brian Bennudriti. Consider me the head Grailrunner, I suppose. My name’s Italian, if you’re wondering, and it means “well fed”. Nice, huh? I’m from Tennessee, living now in Kansas City.

Growing up, I was alone alot and lost in sketchpads or science fiction books, 1970’s tv shows, or comics. I spent countless hours dreaming up shining futuristic cities and wise-cracking superheroes…even used to imagine Spider Man crawling on the walls of my room to chat with me. Probably because of all that and momentum from how it felt experiencing the first three Star Wars movies as they premiered in theaters firing “pew pew” blasters at passing cars on the way home, I went on to earn a Physics degree and serve in nuclear reactor departments in the U.S. Navy years later. Something happened during that time in a rock gorge in Oman that changed me.

With a head full of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, old John Wayne western movies, and the first three books of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, I was on a six-month deployment in the Persian Gulf. Some friends and I spent the night in the desert in Oman to swim in a rock gorge out there and sleep under the stars. It wasn’t a dream or a vision, nothing that definitive, but I clearly saw at once that night in my mind’s eye the image of a lone gunslinger figure walk into a dusty saloon unarmed. Everyone inside, mostly tired soldiers and bandits, froze in fear – not at any guns he might carry, but rather at the shadowy snipers who accompanied him: those outside, and possibly inside as well.

I can’t explain how fully formed that picture was, and all the questions it raised have fueled what became the world of the Salt Mystic. I’m still answering them.

My day job now is management consultant, and probably my main expertise is unlocking creativity and innovation in factory operations and maintenance departments to solve complex problems. It makes me a life-long student of how the imagination works and a rabit experimenter in ways to unleash the fiery cauldrons inside our heads to work wonders. Grailrunner is a lab for you and I to see just how wild these horses can run (and hopefully to sell you some saddles).

What do we do?

What all that looks like for us so far is a western-themed science fantasy setting called Salt Mystic, appearing in novel, art, and game form, as well as in the fusion of art and flash fiction we call ‘lore cards’. Think of it as plasma gunslingers exploring software-haunted ruins and lost pocket dimensions.

Additionally, we offer an intriguing experimental short story collection called Kyot: The Storybook Puzzle Box with 140 pieces of flash fiction in ten chapters building an expansive overarching narrative. Each chapter ends with vignette pieces that together pose the key riddle upon which the book is based. The solution is provided in a final chapter, but that’s cheating.

The Grailrunner site itself is a mind-expanding gallery of interesting short articles covering everything from classic pulp fiction to fascinating novelties of history to interviews with some of the most dynamic creative personalities of the day. Check out our ongoing series links here.

Then there’s the merch – art prints and t-shirts primarily, but all geared uniquely to tell part of a story or immerse you in the imagined worlds of Grailrunner. This is particularly exciting to us, because it will be growing like gangbusters soon as we commission original art pieces to feed the growing gallery of offerings. Keep an eye on this site for developments!

Thanks for stopping by to meet us! Someone is going to create something amazing today.

Let’s inspire them.

(We have a theme song now. Want to hear it? Click below to listen! Click here for lyrics.)