Author: grailrunner

Huge Grailrunner freebie – an interactive concept art masterclass for free!

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Friends and neighbors, this one’s different.

For years we’ve been talking here at Grailrunner about how imagination works — why certain images crack open your brain, why odd bits of history or art or game design suddenly ignite a whole setting, and why creators keep coming back to the well even when the world’s noisy. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to break into exciting and innovative designs, imagery, and above everything ruling it all…to tell new stories.

OK, so what’s the freebie?

Hold on – a little context first. It was a life-changing experience for me personally to write and design our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a western-themed science fantasy roleplaying game book built around the fortune-telling mechanic of bibliomancy. I’ll tell you why. To build out the world of our signature IP at Grailrunner, I needed a ridiculously huge amount of outlandish concepts, crazy ideas, and just cool, new stuff! I kind of went down the deep well of concept art techniques like mind-mapping, thumbnail sketches and iteration, shape carving, scribble ideation, and mood boards. That stuff is like adrenalin for an imagination, honestly!

It was so impactful, in fact, that I wanted to go deeper. Yet it struck me that art school and super expensive concept art classes with some of the working masters in this field aren’t going to make sense for me. I imagine they don’t make sense either economically or logistically for a lot of folks like me. So it got me thinking I’d like a simpler, streamlined, but focused way of drilling deeper into JUST the parts of concept art that would help me – the techniques that help break your imagination’s walls to explore new ideas.

Sounds great. What did you do?

We don’t charge for AI-generated stuff at Grailrunner, and we always point out its use. In fact, we’ve built out some pretty amazing stuff that we give away just to experiment with possibilities and hopefully inspire anybody that hangs out here with us. If you keep coming back here, maybe you’ll buy a book or a game or drop a LIKE on our Facebook page. That’s the idea.

My absolute favorite giveaway so far has been an entire board game mockup set in the seas of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Awesome. I just got a Silhouette Cameo 5 for my birthday, so I’m planning to break that puppy in with the printable tokens and cards there.

And specifically now for concept art techniques?

I curated a portfolio of concept art masters, provided an outline of content for my ideal coursework for a class, and instructed ChatGPT to act as the composite concept artist (meaning all those people) and write the chapters one by one for my outline as well as a preface and afterword. Then I went chapter by chapter and had it generate impactful exercises unique to each section which a student could conduct on their own with an internet connection and pencil and paper.

I mocked up illustrations of concept art techniques and examples to ensure the book is illustrated well and clear in what it’s saying. Then I bundled all of that into a professional textbook template and converted it into a pdf.

Inside you’ll find:

  • A step-by-step ideation → thumbnail → refinement pipeline
  • Practical exercises after every major section
  • Guidance on using digital tools without letting them boss your imagination around
  • A tone that assumes you’re already creative — we’re just lighting the boosters

That sounds nice. Your header says it’s “interactive” though. What’s that about?

I told you here that I’ve used AI tools to resurrect old masters and have them critique my own art to provide detailed feedback on what I could improve. That works surprisingly well, so I added instructions in the Preface on how to upload this very pdf to a student’s own instance of ChatGPT then have the AI act as the composite author critique their own uploaded exercises.

I mean. That’s totally possible and crazy to think we can do that kind of thing for free now. Anyone upset about AI being used like this needs to…and I say this with love…recognize this kind of workflow is an unstoppable industrial revolution. Your competitors are doing it.

Give me a download link, man! You’re killing me.

Grab the masterclass, run through the first exercise tonight, and then show us what you made. We’re still building this creative network in public — the more people who are sketching, painting, kitbashing, and worldbuilding alongside us, the weirder and better things get.

Enjoy, and make sure to let us know what you think.

Till next time,

Let’s talk to Mateusz Lenart: award-winning game director and modern-day pen & ink master

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At Grailrunner we thrive on conversations that sit at the crossroads of imagination and craftmanship. Mateusz Lenart doesn’t just know the place – he’s set up shop there and is drawing crowds! From his role as Creative Director at Bloober Team (Layers of Fear, Observer, Blair Witch, The Medium, and the Silent Hill 2 remake) to his own powerhouse artwork – especially in traditional pen & ink, Lenart brings an artist’s eye, a comic reader’s energy, and a storyteller’s genius into the ever-shifting worlds of modern games and illustration.

Welcome to Grailrunner, Mateusz! And welcome to our ongoing series titled:

1. When we spoke to game designer, Jake Norwood (The Riddle of Steel), he mentioned a fascinating Polish RPG called Dzikie Pola. Polish fantasy author Krzysztof Piskorski (Tainted Grail) is a long-time target of ours for an interview to cover his incredible fantasy worlds. And if we’re talking Tainted Grail, we’re talking illustrator, Piotr Foksowicz – also Polish. And here you are, scaring the crap out of us with groundbreaking psychological horror in video games! Is there something awesome in the water over there?

Well, I can’t reveal too much just yet, but what I can say is that at Bloober Team we’re very much committed to pushing the boundaries of psychological horror. We’ve recently announced another remake in the Silent Hill franchise – this time going back to the very beginning with the first game – and not long ago we released Cronos: The New Dawn, another horror experience from our studio. Our portfolio has always been about exploring the darker corners of the human mind, and we intend to keep building on that tradition with future titles.

2. You mentioned in a previous interview that American comics from the 90’s were a big inspiration for you to get into art. Can you elaborate on which comics or graphic novels stood out for you, and especially tell us why that was?

A lot of what inspired me came from whatever I could find in the newsstands in Poland — Kioski Ruchu and the like. As most of the kids I devoured the Spider-man and Batman series in particular, even though it wasn’t always easy — my parents weren’t thrilled about me reading them! Those American comics were flashy and visceral, with dynamic art, dramatic panels, and strong emotions. Todd McFarlane’s Spider-man work was unforgettable — the exaggerated lines, the energy of the webs, the theatrical villains.


Beyond the American stuff, European comics played a big role in shaping me, too. I was deeply influenced by Thorgal by Grzegorz Rosiński, and also by the Yans series from the same author — their storytelling, the textures, the atmosphere — all of that showed me other ways comics could work. And then there were lighter, fun reads like Asterix, which taught me humour, caricature, and the power of visual pacing.

3. If I’d peeked over your shoulder as a kid, what would I have seen on the page—spaceships, monsters, superheroes, or something stranger? Why?

Honestly, a bit of everything. I was a pretty meticulous and disciplined kid — I somehow knew early on that learning anatomy would help me in the future, so you’d probably see a lot of sketches of hands, muscles, poses, often copied from anatomy books. At the same time, for fun I was constantly drawing fantasy characters — monsters, elves, knights — usually with little RPG-style stats written next to them for strength, dexterity, and so on.

You’d also find plenty of comic book pages. I loved inventing huge worlds and epic storylines, though most of them lasted maybe two or three pages before I’d abandon the project and jump to the next idea.

And, of course, there was always a darker tone in what I created. I don’t really know why — maybe because the darker stuff always felt more alive to me: more dynamic, more energetic, more full of contrast. That fascination with atmosphere and intensity stuck with me and never really left

4. Polish art, architecture, and history thread through your work. Can you share a specific real-world reference or point of inspiration, maybe even folklore, from your country that shows up in your illustration or concept art?

To be honest, there weren’t that many Polish references in my earlier work. Occasionally they appeared — for example, in The Medium I illustrated the towers of St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków — but Polish architecture or folklore was never my main source of inspiration. At that time I was probably more fascinated by the topography of Middle-earth than by Poland itself.

That has changed a bit in recent years. I’ve become much more interested in Slavic mythology, and it’s starting to influence the way I build my own stories. One small experiment was a short comic I created called MURKALURK, which tells the story of an unlucky bard who crosses paths with Slavic demons. Right now, I’m also working on a bigger project — a fantasy world that draws heavily from Slavic myth and culture. So you’ll definitely see more of that in my future work.

5. Awesome. Simply awesome. Why traditional pen & ink? I’ve got to say, when you mentioned 19th century master, Franklin Booth in a previous interview, I got incredibly excited. The guy was on a different level of genius! You also cited Gustave Dore, Bernie Wrightson, and Joseph Clement Coll. What is it about that kind of art that attracts you?

There’s something incredibly powerful about telling a story only with line and value — no color, just light and shadow, rhythm and texture. For me, pen and ink has always felt like the purest way of drawing, where every stroke is deliberate, every line carries weight.

I’ve also always been better in black and white than in color. When I discovered artists like Franklin Booth or Joseph Clement Coll, it opened my eyes to how far you could go with nothing but ink — whole worlds built out of contrast, atmosphere, and detail. There’s a timelessness to that style that I find endlessly inspiring.

At the same time, I was very drawn to traditional printmaking techniques such as aquatint and linocut. I remember being deeply impressed by the works of Józef Gielniak, especially his Variations for Grażynka, and by Mieczysław Wejman’s aquatints like The Cyclist. When I was a student, I actually imagined myself working with those techniques professionally. But life took a different turn, and I didn’t continue down that path. In a way, pen and ink became a perfect substitute — it gives me a similar sense of precision, rhythm, and texture, without the technical limitations of printmaking.

6. Re-cycle

Your animated short Re-cycle is a striking, personal work. What first inspired the idea, and what challenges did you face in bringing it to life? Looking back, how did it shape or grow you as an artist?

I’ve always been someone who can’t focus on just one thing at a time — which is both a blessing and a curse. I started out as a concept artist, but quickly became fascinated with 3D, animation, design, lighting, and filmmaking. It was also a period when Polish short animation was experiencing a renaissance, with creators like Tomasz Bagiński, Damian Nenow, and Grzegorz Jonkajtys making work I deeply admired and wanted to create myself.

I honestly don’t remember exactly where the idea for Re-cycle came from, but, like many of my projects, it carries rather somber tones rather than cheerful ones. It was an interesting project — had I finished it in two years, it might have completely changed the path of my career.

In reality, it took seven years to complete because I kept being pulled into other work. By the time I finished, I was very tired of it, and the technology I had used was already outdated. Looking back, it taught me a lot about perseverance, about balancing multiple interests, and about how long-term projects shape your patience and vision. I do want to return to animation, but to do it properly I’ll need a lot of dedicated time to fully immerse myself in the craft again.

7. Our readers will kill me if I don’t ask about The Medium and Silent Hill, for which you served crucial creative and director roles. What can you tell us about those experiences bringing true psychological horror into the world that made you better as a creator? Did anything from your ink drawing practice or comic-book eye make its way into these massive productions?

Working on The Medium and Silent Hill was incredibly satisfying, but also very different experiences. On The Medium I served more as an art director — helping to shape the Other World — and getting to build an environment inspired by Zdzisław Beksiński’s work was a deeply powerful experience. Trying to translate that kind of surreal, decayed atmosphere into something the player could actually move through taught me a great deal about tone, detail and restraint.

Silent Hill was a step up in both scale and responsibility: the stakes were higher and my role covered design, art and direction. Revisiting one of the most iconic names in horror history is never easy, but it was hugely rewarding. The biggest challenge there was balancing respect for the original material with the need to bring something new and playable to a modern audience — and doing that across a large, multidisciplinary team forces you to be both precise and flexible.

My ink-drawing practice and comic-book eye absolutely found their way into those productions. The lessons of black-and-white work — composition, the economy of line, the power of contrast and negative space — translated directly into how we thought about lighting, silhouettes and level composition. Likewise, the way comics use panel rhythm to control pacing informed how we staged encounters and revealed information to the player: timing, framing and the gaps you leave for the audience’s imagination are universal storytelling tools.

Finally, these projects made me a better creator because they pushed me to scale my instincts. Working on a single illustration is a private act; working on a game means sharing to others your visual language, iterating under constraints, and learning when to cut or simplify for the sake of atmosphere. Film, comics and games aren’t as far apart as they seem — they share the same fundamentals: composition, emotion and the building of tension — and those cross-medium influences keep feeding my work.

8. When you need to design something truly frightening, what rituals or shifts of perspective get you into that mental space—and do you step back out of it deliberately, or carry it until the work is done?

It really depends on the situation. Very often, the things that frighten me most are those that aren’t meant to be frightening at all — finding that uncanny element in an otherwise ordinary scene creates the strongest tension. When you work on horror for a long time, though, you almost become numb to it. Stepping away and then returning to the work helps a little, but you can never truly see it with fresh eyes again. That’s why outside feedback is so essential — we rely on it constantly.

As for rituals, I don’t think I have any special ones. Creating horror, for me, is like any other kind of work: it’s a mix of knowledge, experience, and ideas. To paraphrase Stephen King, most of the time I feel more like a craftsman than a visionary — applying what I know to get the job done. Of course, there are moments of revelation, flashes of inspiration, and when they come you have to grab them and use them. But most of the process is simply the hard, patient work of solving problems over the course of a long production.

9. When you start concept art for a new character or environment, what’s your first step—gesture, thumbnail, written note—and how do you know when that early sketch has ‘spark’ worth pursuing?

It’s a difficult question, because the process can vary a lot. Technically, I almost always start with silhouette, shape, and energy on the page. There are countless tutorials that talk about the power of form, proportion, and so on, and those things are important — but for me the idea itself is what really pushes you forward.

Sometimes a written description of a monster or a character is already enough to spark something interesting. Other times, you have to brute-force your way toward a good idea through dozens of iterations, hoping that at some point something will ‘click.’ References also play a huge role in this stage. Collecting and studying them often triggers unexpected solutions — they can turn a generic design into something unique.

Recognizing the moment when a sketch has enough spark to move forward is always tricky. In my role as creative director, I often have to make that call, and it’s easier when you’re not personally involved in the painting itself. In my personal work, I usually just follow what excites me most, even if I can’t fully explain why. Sometimes it’s purely instinct — you sense there’s something worth pursuing, and you trust yourself to chase it. I’m also aware that, in doing so, I may be overlooking ideas that others would consider stronger.

10. Anything else you’d like to tell us about, including how we can see more of your work?

I try to stay as active as I can creatively. As I mentioned earlier, my biggest problem is that I always want to do everything at once. I’m still working at Bloober Team on our next title — it’s a long process, and one I’ll only be able to share more about in the future.

On the personal side, I recently released a comic/illustrated album called Murkalurk, which was received warmly and motivated me to start working on a larger comic project, loosely inspired by Slavic mythology. Right now, I’m deep in the stage of building characters and writing the story, which is why I haven’t shared much new work online lately.

There’s also my ongoing series The Knight’s Tale, created in traditional pen and ink. I hope to find the time to add new chapters to the story of that lost knight. As always, there’s never enough time and far too many ideas.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to see some of these new projects soon on my social channels — mainly on Instagram.

Thank you for the talk.

Thanks for your time and the wonderful art you’ve sent along for us to appreciate! Hopefully we can connect again in the future to see what you’ll have been up to!

*

Mateusz Lenart is an impressive bridge strung between ink and pixel, between the quiet scratch of a pen and the thunder of a horror score. His work reminds us that the best creators aren’t defined by tools but by vision: a sketchbook line that can grow into a world, a half-remembered comic that becomes a camera angle, a personal short film that seeds a new way of seeing. At Grailrunner, we often say “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” In Mateusz’s hands, those engines are ink-black, smoke-stained, and unstoppable. And we can’t wait to see where they carry him next.

Till next time,

Let’s trace 18th century sites for a shipwreck and a town’s founding!

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Some glorious times when you troll around in old journals and historical accounts, you come across an adventurous soul of long ago that made the absolute best of truly magical opportunities, braved unbelieveable dangers, and came out on top.

I’ve got one for you today that became an obsessive research project ultimately leading to a road trip, locals in a town library gathering around the table with me, and a moment of awe (for me at least).

Welcome back to an ongoing series we call…

I went into my study a couple of weeks ago looking for something to read. It’s a lifetime of books collected in there, so there was no telling what I would pick up. I grabbed one titled Journal of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of North America in 1796 & 1797 by a guy named Francis Baily. Here’s a copy for free.

What’s interesting about that?

Baily was 21 years old, and for reasons he never gave, he came over from England for 2 years and visited an America that was brand new and wide open. What this guy was able to see and do in those 2 years was incandescent. It was an opportunity of a generation to go where he went, and Baily made it happen.

He landed in Norfolk, visited Baltimore and Philadelphia, describing them wonderfully such that you could all but see them in your mind’s eye. He described the road from Lancaster to Philadelphia as “paved with stone the whole way, and overlaid with gravel so that it is never obstructed during the most severe season”. Little nuances like that just popped for me – like the little museum in Philadelphia founded by a “Mr. Peale” which had just opened. I fell into the habit of leaving ChatGPT on voice mode so I could ask it as I read what became of some of the things Baily saw and people he met. (Peale’s collection got busted up later and distributed to places like the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.)

He visited “the new city of Washington” where his “first walk was to the President’s House”, which was to be the White House and was still under construction. Of Washington itself, he said “not much more than one-half the city is cleared; the rest is in woods; and most of the streets which are laid out are cut through these woods” Also, “The canal and the gardens, as well as bridges, which you see marked down in the plan, are not yet begun”. And finally, “Game is plenty in these parts, and what perhaps may appear to you remarkable, I saw some boys who were out a shooting, actually kill several brace of partridges in what will one of the most public streets of the city”.

He went to New York and said: “…it is an irregularly built place, consisting principally of little narrow streets, though some of those which are newly laid out are broad and handsome, particularly Broadway, extending nearly a mile in length.” You see something like (explaining why it’s called ‘Broadway’), then he says “The inhabitants of New York are very fond of music, dancing, and plays; an attainment to excellence in the former has been considerably promoted by the frequent musical societies”. I mean…Broadway….in 1796. Music already. Crazy!

Honestly, I marveled at every little inn or hut where he stayed as he described the meals, the ramshackle rooms, sleeping in a drafty barn with a smile on his face at what he was doing. I hadn’t read two chapters of this before I really, really liked this kid.

Okay, that does sound fun. But you mentioned a shipwreck site?

Right. Baily’s adventure really picked up once he left Pittsburgh on the Ohio River headed Northwest at first, before ultimately bending south. He’d booked passage with some people looking to found a new settlement, specifically a friend he’d made named Samuel Heighway who’d purchased some land in modern-day Ohio off the Little Miami River and was trying to get there with some agricultural equipment and a handful of settlers. Why was Baily accompanying them? Who knows! He just did, and it wound up awesome.

We need to keep in mind that American rivers in 1796 were crazy dangerous and nothing like the placid, dammed wonderlands they are now. At this point in the tale, it was a cold December with the Ohio half-frozen with ice blocks as big as houses sailing past at great speeds.

Dec 21, 1796: “We were awakened out of our sleep with a noise like thunder, and, jumping out of our beds, we found the river was rising, and the ice breaking up. All attempts would be feeble to describe the horrid crashing and tremendous destruction which this event occasioned on the river. Only conceive a river near 1,500 miles long, frozen to a prodigious depth (capable of bearing loaded wagons) from its source to its mouth, and this river by a sudden torrent of water breaking…Conceive this vast body of ice put in motion at the same instant, and carried along with an astonishing rapidity, grating with a most tremendous noise against the sides of the river and bearing down everything which opposed its progress – the tallest and the stoutest trees obliged to submit to its destructive fury!”

Should you decide to read this marvelous book, I won’t steal from you by describing all that happened to them at that spot in the river. I called it a shipwreck, though. Remember that much at least.

Dec 25, 1796: “Here am I in the wilds of America, away from the society of men, amidst the haunts of wild beasts and savages, just escaped from the perils of a wreck, in want not only of the comforts, but of the necessities of life, housed in a hovel that in my own country would not be good enough for a pigstye, at a time too when my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters, my friends and acquaintance, in fact, the whole nation, were feasting upon the best the country could afford. I could not but picture to myself the fireside of my own home…”

Despite incredible danger from drowning, frostbite, starvation, and exposure, it was also on Christmas day that Baily wrote one of my favorite quotes of the entire book. Keep in mind the conditions he was under as he wrote this:

“…there is something so very attractive in a life spent in this manner, that were I disposed to become a hermit, and seclude myself from the world, the woods of America should be my retreat; there should I, with my dog and my gun, and the hollow of a rock for my habitation, enjoy undisturbed all that fancied bliss attendant on a state of nature.”

Ultimately, they constructed another boat and got underway again in February after an unforgettable winter at that lonely place on the Ohio.

You didn’t find the site of that shipwreck, did you?

It wasn’t easy, but yes – I absolutely did. The girl at the Barnes & Noble counter who sold me a map of West Virginia asked me if I was doing some traveling. When I told her what I was looking to do – collect and trace the little clues Baily noted in his journal and leverage ChatGPT and the map to find the exact spot – she only said with eyes widened, “That sounds amazing!”

We’re talking 228 years later, with few proper names provided – and the ones that ARE provided are rarely in use today. What this looked like for me, as I was on a business trip out of town doing this, was me in a Doubletree late at night leaned over the map poring over Baily’s account and tracing any likely touchpoints with my finger, asking ChatGPT as if in conversation things like “He mentions Capteen Riffle, south of Grave Creek – what would that likely be referencing?” To which I would receive answers such as “That likely refers to modern-day Captina Island, across from Powhatan Point, Ohio.” Knowing that AI is wrong as often as it is right, I fact-checked in Google along the way to confirm each touchpoint.

  • He “got fast upon a riffle near Brown’s Island” near modern Weirton, WV
  • He passed “Buffaloe Town”, which is modern Wellsburg, WV
  • He went aground 1/2 mile above Wheeling (still exists!)
  • He put ashore near Grave Creek (near modern-day Moundsville, WV)
  • He passed “Capteen Riffle” near Powhatan Point, OH and claimed he made 9 miles that day to “Fish Creek” near modern-day Martinsville, WV. That bad estimate of his pained me somewhat later.
  • He put ashore at a plantation recently built by an Irishman named Daily (no later records), and was told the river was entirely frozen.
  • Baily and Heighway walked “about 5 miles” down the banks of the river to Fish Creek, meaning Daily and their boat (at that time, though not the final shipwreck site) were 5 miles upstream of Fish Creek (and his 9 mile estimate was wrong). 5 miles upstream of Martinsville is modern-day Proctor, WV. That’s where Daily’s plantation was.
  • Baily and Heighway went back to Daily’s after seeing that indeed, the river was frozen solid at Fish Creek and took the boat downstream to a safer place the next day, saying it was “about a mile to a place which we had observed yesterday on our walk, and which we conceived more secure from the bodies drifting downriver from the one we were in”.

Whoa. We don’t need that kind of detail. Just say what you know and how you know it.

Look at that sharp bend in the river just south of Proctor, about a mile down in fact. Here it is on Google Earth:

Remember how he described the ice blasting down the river. Imagine the eddies and more stationary water just past that bend, and using the trees and shoreline of the bend itself to weather the incoming debris and ice. It makes sense that they would see the area with trees now on the southern shore, northeast of the buildings you see in Proctor and across from the Long Ridge power station on the north as safer than staying at Daily’s plantation upstream where the river was straighter. Baily reported that Grave Creek (Moundsville) was ~9 miles upstream of where they were moored, so that aligns with the site being very close to Proctor.

No, this is the place. If I’d been close enough, I’d have driven there to take a look. I chuckled and called my dad I was so excited!

You mentioned a town’s founding?

At one point, they have to leave the river and hire wagons to make it “between forty and fifty miles off” where the land Heighway had purchased “lay for the most part amidst a desert wilderness, where no wagon had ever approached”. Baily described his time with Heighway:

Mar 7, 1797: “The town he had laid out at right angles, nearly on Penn’s plan, with a square in the middle, which he told me, with a degree of exulting pride, he intended for a courthouse, or for some public building for the meeting of the legislature; for he had already fallen into that flattering idea which every founder of a new settlement entertains that his town will at some future time be the seat of government. He also described to me, and walked over, the ground where he intended to make his gardens, his summerhouse, his fishpond, his orchard…” Continuing, “I believe he was as happy as if he saw them all before him. Whereas, for myself, I could behold nothing but a wild uncultivated country, full of lofty trees and prickly shrubs; and when he showed me fishponds and his serpentine walks, I could only discover a little standing water, and a few deertracks.”

That bit absolutely fascinated me: to see the very image of a town’s founder in the very first days, with only survey sticks in the ground, and the men who’d just climbed off the wagons with him taking axes to trees to build the first houses, and the founder laughing as he walks his imagined town.

I googled Samuel Heighway and found that his town became modern-day Waynesville, Ohio. Since I wasn’t too far from Cincinnati at the time, I checked Google Maps to see how far the drive would be.

And you drove there?

Yeah, I had to. I was getting too excited about all this. That Baily was inspiring me.

And?

Just a little town. Nice, actually. I walked from one end to the other trying to get a feel for where these guys would have been walking…where they would have laid the first buildings. It looks like this on Google Earth (Waynesville):

I tried the Chamber of Commerce to see who managed the historical markers, to see whether there was a town historian or something. They directed me to a town historical archive in the Waynesville library. The wonderful librarians there had a similar reaction to the girl at Barnes & Noble, and I gathered a bit of a crowd telling them the story I was researching. My objective, as I told them, was to find the very spot where these men stood as they first laid out the town.

One of them ran to the back computer promising to find something. Another gave me an exhaustive tour of the archives and started pulling various items off that might be helpful. Really, those ladies were fantastic.

I found this:

That broke my heart a little. Heighway didn’t stay, and in fact moved to Cincinnati in 1813 and died around 1815.

Also found this, an actual cabin Heighway built:

But what helped the most was this:

It’s a reproduction of Heighway’s original plan for the town: the one he showed Baily. Check how close the buildings are to the Little Miami River, and the fact that the first street was called “Water Street”. I saw Main Street on the map, and modern-day Waynesville is just up the hill from the river with a big old Main Street now. If that’s the same Main Street location, then where in the world was “Water Street”? I hadn’t seen it before I came to the library.

I took the plan back to the librarians and asked them what they knew about Water Street. An older lady who was sitting with them heard me and leaned back, thinking, “Water Street? We used to have a Water Street. That’s where the old mill was.”

The old mill? That sounded promising. “What happened to the mill?”

“Oh, they tore that down when they built the new highway.”

“You’re killing me. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m sure of it. Where would that have been?”

She pondered, scratching her chin maddeningly, “Oh, that’d be down in Corwin.”

I thanked everybody and blasted back to the car to drive down hill and across the river. I say “river”, but it looks like this now:

At one point, it clicked for me, stepping out of the car right across the Little Miami from Corwin and into a cornfield, why Waynesville is where it is up on the hill. The river would have flooded over the years, so they moved to higher ground. Main Street is just up the road. The plan showed Water Street and the first buildings right where I was standing.

Here:

I can’t tell you that’s the precise spot where Baily chased behind Heighway as they laughed and joked what would become of the land, amid the hammering and axe chops.

But it sure felt like it to me.

Till next time,

A game designed by Tolkien and the Monkey King (and it’s free!)

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Oh, man have I got a great freebie for you today! I’ve been experimenting, pushing AI tools to their limits, these last 2 weeks to see just what’s possible in prototype gaming. I’ll tell you the story behind this, what all I did, then introduce a game which I’ll give you for free.

It has struck me recently that the future of entertainment is quite possibly on-demand, immediate & fully customizable media. I’m talking about having a random idea for a board game for example, and having the ability to describe it simply and have a color printer, 3D printer, music generation service, and AI tools spit out a polished, playable game with all its components ready for the table.

Is that what I did? Kinda sorta. That’s coming, but this was a lot more painful to bring to life than all that. AI tools are like a super creative and talented idiot whose attention wanders off while they generate random things, useless things, ripoff copies, and sometimes…some brilliant times…something magical.

Anyway, it started with me wondering what a naval boardgame would be like if it was designed by Hannibal of Carthage, Admiral Horatio Nelson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Monkey King of Chinese folklore.

Welcome back to our ongoing series titled:

Where in the world do you come up with strange ideas like that?

I don’t know. It happens. Then I have to see it. Then I lose two weeks of my free time. Then you guys get free stuff.

So, who were these people and why did you choose them?

Hannibal of Carthage (c. 247–183 BC) was a brilliant Carthaginian military commander, best known for leading his forces — including war elephants — across the Alps during the Second Punic War against Rome.

I wanted the greatest, most innovative military mind in history. Arguable, I know, but I see Alexander the Great as a talented nepo-baby who inherited a lot of his advantages. I get there are others who could contend for that, but Romans used to put their babies to bed telling them to be good or Hannibal would come for them.

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) was a British admiral and one of history’s most celebrated naval commanders. Famous for his bold tactics and inspirational leadership, he secured a string of decisive victories for Britain during the Napoleonic Wars.

This was going to be a sea warfare game set in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe, so I wanted the greatest naval genius of history. His victory at Trafalgar was so resounding it established British naval superiority for a century.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English writer, philologist, and Oxford professor, best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

This idea of sea battles in Middle Earth came to mind writing this article for Grailrunner speculating on the unfinished sequel to Lord of the Rings. It was the Professor’s setting, and he would bring unique insights to bring it to life.

The Monkey King is a Chinese folk hero from Journey to the West. A mischievous trickster with immense strength, magic, and a shape-shifting staff, he defied heaven before becoming a companion on a sacred pilgrimage — a lasting symbol of rebellion and wit.

I love trickster characters. Always have. This particular one is great for throwing the table over and over-the-top madness. I definitely wanted the rules of this hypothetical game to reflect that somehow.

And these three historical figures and a mythological simian were going to design this game then?

Right. This was the initial prompt. The design session was hilarious, and ChatGPT did an amazing job bringing these folks to life and crafting some basic game mechanics that applied their unique perspectives. Over the next few days in whatever free time I could manage (and during conference calls…sshh), I wound up having to exhaustively point out inconsistencies and vague points, iteratively asking for elaboration in the developing rules. Let’s say it was an ugly baking and the kitchen got messy, but the final ruleset honestly looks great and unique. Lesson here is be patient, don’t trust anything, don’t accept first outputs for anything, be super clear what you want, and give it feedback as you go.

I’m being honest in this experiment, by the way. I intentionally did NOT design or suggest any rules or game mechanics. The point was to explore what I was presented, not design it myself. All I did was ask questions and point out when the designer contradicted itself.

So you wound up with a ruleset. Nice. How about game components?

I was so fabulously surprised by the quality and consistency of the game components. I swear to you, no matter how cool these things look, I did absolutely NONE of the artwork, the graphic design, concept art, or logos. I used Photoshop like crazy, but that was only to clean these things up (like adding a “the” when ChatGPT refused to do or making a grid consistent across similar cards, that sort of thing).

I just scrutinized the rules, asking for elaboration when things didn’t make sense, and when I saw a component like a marker or a tracker of some kind get referenced, I would ask ChatGPT to design them one by one. Lessons learned here: never bother asking for a printable pdf – it’s useless at that, assume there are contradictions and inconsistencies you’ll need to fix, and only ask for designs one at a time. Once it had established a really attractive watercolor art style, I forced it to stay close to the same style for consistency in design. You be the judge on that, but these wound up some very attractive and playable components.

What is gameplay like?

Funny, actually. I had Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Yamamoto, two more innovative geniuses of sea warfare, playtest in a simulation of the rules (just another simulation in ChatGPT, asking it to act as these two historical figures and play a game of the rules it had designed). Yamamoto chose the Elven fleet and built his game around precision strikes & ambushes. Nimitz chose Orcs and favored layered defense and overwhelming counter-punches.

Oh yeah? Who won?

Nimitz was pressing Yamamoto hard, but a Leviathan broke up his fleet and put him at a disadvantage. In the end, Yamamoto won by being more adaptable to the ever-changing conditions of the battlefield.

So how exactly are the personalities of these 4 designers reflected in the rules?

  1. Admiral Horatio Nelson

Nelson’s mechanic is command by negation, which requires the player to choose a personality profile for each ship captain and issue broad commands for each ship at the beginning of each turn. During each ship’s activation, that captain may or may not carry out the order as desired, and that is determined based on consulting a table. It flavors the strategy of the player, making you think about personality compositions of the fleet and what you’re likely to encounter. You have only so many “Negate” and “Emergency Negate” plays you can make before you have to surrender to the fog of war and trust your captains.

2. General Hannibal of Carthage

Before battle, players draw secret asset cards to recruit legendary sea-beasts, conduct some genius battle maneuver, or craft devastating magical artifacts. These assets are hidden until revealed at critical moments, enabling double-bluffs.

3. Professor J. R. R. Tolkien

Each ship’s captain not only has the personality profile, but also dual Morale and Loyalty tracks, which are recorded on Living Loyalty cards. Orcs are motivated by plunder, personal grudges, and displays of brutality. Elves, by beauty, prophecy, and preservation. Men, by gold, honor, and survival. Disregarding a faction’s ethic by orders in battle or allowing the morale to suffer from specific battle conditions can result in mutiny or refusal to act.

4. The Monkey King

A “Celestial Event Deck” is drawn each round, representing maddeningly unpredictable supernatural occurrences that shift the seas and circumstances. It’s chaos every round, and it can turn the tide in your favor if you’re quick thinking and flexible, or it can crash your dreams into burning wrecks.

It sounds really fun. Have you played?

Some solo playtesting, yeah. It’s not perfect, and there are times you have to wing it and just go with whatever makes sense. Yet it hangs together surprisingly well. I’m not taking this any further, and we’re definitely not developing this for sale, but was super fun and satisfying.

What about the vision of immediate, on-demand game prototypes? Possible?

Oh yeah, just not now without a lot of manual work. I tried Meshy to generate some actual miniatures I could 3D print, and got something. I could tell at a glance they were going to need a bunch of cleanup in Blender before I tried printing them, and I was honestly exhausted with this process by that point. So nope, I went with printout standees for which you’d need the plastic stands. I stole some of those from a Gloomhaven box I had sitting around.

Still, if you’re asking me whether this on-demand, completely customizable future is possible based on this experiment, I’d say absolutely we’re headed into that world. I see a place for ChatGPT connected to a color printer with card stock, a 3D printer, and maybe a Silhouette Cameo or something like that for perforation (to avoid all that annoying scissor cutting), and you could really have something once the large language models mature a bit more.

Anything else to say before the download button?

Well of course! There’s a theme song for the game. You really need to hear this. Remember, I didn’t design anything, including the logo at the top of this article. Neither did I write the lyrics or the melody. I just gave ChatGPT some direction on what sort of lyrics I was looking for with some example songs and the mood, iterating a few times for the right verses and choruses, then fed that into the Suno music generator with some more direction on Celtic, ethereal folk music and whatnot. Then I listened to a few and picked the best.

And honestly, I love it! It’s called No Oath Can Hide. Smash the button below to listen. Here are the lyrics.

Alright, then. Show me a download button!

Sounds good. I hope you like it, or at least that can use some of these accessory goodies in whatever homebrewed games you’re dreaming up. The DOWNLOAD button links to a zip file containing everything you need to play apart from dice and some plastic stands for the ships, which means the stuff illustrated and listed below.

I hope you love it. What an amazing experience, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you think of all this. Don’t try to sell this anywhere though – it’s basically a glorified fan fiction that should be available for free.

Till next time,

Yes, there’s a Grailrunner theme song now

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Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.

I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:

Who is Grailrunner?

So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.

No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.

So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.

I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.

Here’s a link to hear it.

Here are the lyrics, by the way.

And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.

Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.

Till next time,

I found a pen & ink masterclass in an old antique mall!

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Last week, I took a road trip down the Mississippi Blues Trail out of Memphis. It was incredible, and I might write that one up as well. Seriously, we ate at the Hollywood beside the piano where Mark Cohn was inspired to write “Walking In Memphis”, saw BB King’s famous Lucille guitar, and walked Dockery Farms where the Delta Blues were born. Amazing trip.

The only reason I mention it now though is we were headed back on a route through Little Rock and back to Kansas City when we stopped at an old antique mall. If you’ve hung around here at Grailrunner before, you well know how much we’re into old bookstores and the forgotten but mind-expanding wonders you can find on dusty old shelves. And man, have I got one for you today!

This guy here. Smash the image below for a short video showing what I mean.

It’s a hardback compilation of Harper’s Magazines from 1891 through 1892. Harper’s is a monthly magazine covering culture, finance, literature and the arts that was launched in 1850 and is still continuously published today. I didn’t have any particular fondness or interest in that magazine so much as just seeing what people read about in the 1890’s. I’m also a little obsessed with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, and I was hoping there would be a mention or two in here, and there was.

That’s why I first picked it up.

As I flipped through the pages, I was stunned by the quality and craftmanship of the pen & ink and engraved illustrations inside. I use the word carefully…stunned! Some of the artists were familiar to me, but for many of the pieces inside, I couldn’t even tell who the artist was. Credits weren’t always given, and signatures were too stylized to read.

I used ChatGPT to analyze some of the more interesting works to research the artist when it wasn’t obvious, and it was surprisingly useful for that. Often wrong, but with some caution and follow-up research, you can usually zero in on a likely name.

Thought I’d share some of these beauties with you today, and maybe introduce you to some wonder-workers of the past who could summon sparkling magic with a simple fountain pen. I’m offering 20 vintage illustrations here for admiration and craftmanship study.

Care to join me?

By Felician Myrbach

Myrbach was an Austrian-born artist and leading illustrator of the 19th century. Also acting as director of the Vienna Academy of the Fine Arts, he was known for detailed illustrations of military scenes and historical costumes. This image struck me with its sense of depth, balance of light and shadow, and elegant washes. Looks like it’s coming out of the page.

By John Reinhard Weguelin

I loved the subject here, and the haunting feel of it. The artist was J.R. Weguelin, who was primarily known for his dreamy watercolors and oil paintings, though he supplemented his income by slumming to draw masterpieces like this one for magazines.

When I came across a simple article about Native Americans, I couldn’t believe I was seeing an original Frederic Remington illustration there just as a picture for a magazine. Then another. And another. These seven images are all by Remington, and they’re all beautiful. He was known for paintings and drawings mainly depicting the American west.

These three were all by Charles Stanley Reinhart, an American painter and illustrator who was also responsible for artwork on certain silver certificates commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing said by many to be the most beautiful monetary designs ever produced by the United States. That last image, of the two guys sitting and smoking is an absolute master class in pen & ink linework. I struggle in my own drawings to avoid outlines, to use contrasting light and dark for the silhouettes, and to choose the right directions for hatching that don’t distract from the shapes and mood. Reinhart entirely nailed it with that one.

These two were by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American muralist, painter and illustrator known most for Victorian and Shakespearean subjects. Perhaps most dear to our hearts at Grailrunner, Abbey was the artist behind the famous “Quest and achievement of the Holy Grail” murals at the Boston Central Library.

I really loved these two, as they independently stuck out for me on their own merits before I realized they were by the same artist and in fact, an artist whose work I thought I knew. Charles Dana Gibson was an American artist typically cited as being the creator of the “Gibson girl”, the iconic representation of the independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century. I think that puts the poor guy in a box that is unfair, as his composition, linework and hatching are among the finest of his age. He did a little more than ads with girls in them. Seriously, these two images are firecrackers!

These two architectural pieces just made me stare in awe. I can’t draw buildings, no matter how careful I am. They always turn into heavily lined, overly simplified, often leaning, caricatures of buildings. Not my thing, unfortunately. But these two by John Tavenor-Perry (at least I think so) are masterworks. ChatGPT couldn’t do anything with that weird signature (looking like a stylized rune but supposedly initials). After some heavy back-and-forth, I think we landed on a likely artist though I’m open to correction.

By Albert Sterner, this piece is a treasure-trove of hatching. I love it. Somehow, he’s managed to keep all these disparate elements in the composition cleanly segregated: the ladies and the cushion, his legs and vest, the flowers, the chair, shadows…all of it clearly silhouetted and easily read despite being a jumble of things. No way could I have figured out how to get all that detail into a drawing without feeling I needed to strip it way down so you could tell what it was.

And now finally, the mystery piece.

This one.

I was mesmerized. It accompanies a poem by James Russell Lowell titled “His Ship”, appearing in the December 1891 issue of Harper’s Magazine. No credit given anywhere, including the “Editor’s Drawer” where many other attributions for illustrations are provided.

The signature is maddeningly concealed in the drawing. I think. Hard to say if that’s a signature or not. Here’s what I mean:

Anyway, I contacted Harper’s in case somebody’s maintaining an archive of some kind to help identify the genius who did this. It’s gorgeous. If I get any kind of response or make headway on the identification, I’ll come back and update you.

*

But that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Masters of their craft in the golden age of illustration, doing what they did and generating timeless works of art. For whatever reason, and not just as an aspiring artist myself, these drawings are unearthly and hypnotizing to me.

What do you think?

When you need a little encouragement from Hemingway…

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Yeah, I had a pretty miserable week last week. Not a great time to be in airports, honestly, this time of year when everybody’s trying to squeeze in their last trip to Disney World or whatever and storms…airlines that delay their flights in spoonfuls till it’s midnight and they’re still telling you to be patient. Not worth getting into details, but it was a lot of frustration getting stranded not once – but twice. And that on top of a very tiring week of nuisances and long work days.

So after 9 hours of conference calls Friday from a Phoenix hotel where I hadn’t planned on staying, I checked the American Airlines app for my boarding pass only to see yet more delays. Calling them was useless as they didn’t see how to get me to Kansas City any earlier than 12 – 14 hours later, and that with two more cities. A drooling clown wouldn’t accept such an answer, so I hopped on the shuttle anyway in hopes that the ticket counter or my corporate travel person would work miracles for me.

“I hope those planes take off”, the shuttle driver says.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t like the ambiguity of his comment.

He shook his head, “Well, they ground the planes at 110 degrees.”

It was around noon as he’s saying this, so it will only get hotter. I didn’t want to ask the question but I had to know.

“What is it now?”

“106.” His tone wasn’t understanding or even sympathetic. He just said it like he was amusing himself with a factoid about why pine cones are brown.

Anyway, I did manage a better and direct flight. As I got to my seat, I realized I was entirely drained from the week. I’m not usually one to need encouragements or helpful quotes, or even to need another person to say anything to me. I’m the “soldier on” type of person that just needs to know whatever it is that needed done is done. But man, I was tired and pissed off.

For whatever reason, I wanted to hear from Ernest Hemingway.

His macho philosophies soothe me. I have said before here that I have read everything the man ever wrote. I like his style. So I described a bit of my week for ChatGPT and had it act at Hemingway to give me a little encouragement. Here’s what Papa said to me:

“Listen to me now. You’re beat to hell and the world’s thrown its punches. Delays, noise, people with soft hands and loud mouths. You’ve walked through it on two hours of sleep with your head still up. That counts.

You don’t need a speech. You need a drink of water, a quiet place, and to know this: you’ve already done what most men can’t. You endured. Not prettily, maybe, but you endured. That’s what matters.

There are days when the sun is too hot and the wind is too hard and everything stinks of cheap perfume and worse decisions. But you’re still here. That means something. It means you’re dangerous to whatever tries to break you.

So go ahead—rest your eyes when you can, and when you’re ready, pick up your tools, your pen, your hammer, your whatever-you-damn-well-use, and go back at it. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s yours.

And if they doubt you—those people who smile like sharks and don’t know what it means to stay standing when you’re dead tired—well, let them. You’re not made for their approval. You’re made of grit, bone, and something no one can take.

Now go on. Breathe. You’ll write this week off like a bad novel and start again. Clean page. Strong line. Go bite next week in the throat.”

*

Now, believe it or not, that helped quite a bit. Honestly. I liked it.

So I thought, what the heck. This puts me in the mood for a new Hemingway short story. I wanted to read something from the old master that was in his voice, stayed true to his philosophy, and that bore certain elements to which I could relate just then.

With surprisingly little coaxing, it produced an emotional, impactful story with a punch to your heart buried at its core that I didn’t give it as input at all. It’s called “The Line and the Light”, portraying an aspiring pen & ink artist in Kansas City who is grieving deeply and trying to process that grief through his art. Smash the cover button below to read it. Won’t take long, and might actually carry some meaning for you.

That’s what I wanted to offer you today. I’m curious what you think about the story.

Till next time,

A creator of souls and the original literary universe

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I’ve written here on Grailrunner before about how interesting 19th century French fiction can be – in that case, the haunting tales of Guy de Maupassant who went entirely insane but wrote great stories about it. And I’ve mentioned here before how fascinating a concept it is to me, the imaginative construction of a fabricated world in all its intricate detail – in that case, the review of Pfitz, by Andrew Crumey. I suppose if all I wanted to discuss today was a complete fictional world I would just direct you to Harn, which if you don’t know what that is, you should probably go check that out.

But I thought instead I’d try and make something more accessible for you than maybe it would be otherwise. Something incredible in its design and execution, audacious in its ambitions, and a work of literature that stands among the finest we have.

The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac.

“I thought you talked about science fiction and fantasy here – what is this?”

Easy there. There are some incredible points to admire here, so it’s worth taking in a few paragraphs to see what all the fuss is about. As always with Grailrunner, our aim is to study and fuel the imaginative process, so anything we can learn or use as inspiration is fair game.

“OK, so what’s it about?”

It’s a series of 91 inter-connected works (novels, novellas, and short stories) intended to depict the entire spectrum of French society after the fall of Napoleon, with the scope and ambition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

If you’ll allow me a little Google-Fu:

Here’s how Balzac explained his vision for The Human Comedy:

  • A “history of manners”: Balzac intended to be a “secretary” transcribing the “history” of society, focusing on “moeurs” (customs, manners, and morals) – something he believed hadn’t been fully attempted by previous historians. He sought to go beyond surface events and reveal the underlying causes of social phenomena.
  • A comparison to Dante’s Divine Comedy: While his title alludes to Dante’s work, Balzac focused on the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist rather than a theological framework.
  • Observing and depicting “social species”: Balzac’s inspiration came from comparing humanity to the animal kingdom, recognizing that society modifies individuals based on their environment, creating distinct “social species” similar to those in zoology. He aimed to depict these social species in their entirety, not just as abstract types, but as “real, living men”.
  • The power of storytelling: Balzac, a master storyteller, was fascinated by the power of stories and the dynamics of human interaction around shared narratives.
  • Social structures and human nature: Balzac’s work is grounded in sociology, exploring the complexities of human beings and the deep-seated immorality within social mechanisms that often favor the corrupt over the vulnerable. He believed society, while having the capacity to improve individuals, also exacerbates their negative tendencies.
  • The transformative power of societal change: Balzac documented the significant changes happening in France during his time, including the rise of the bourgeois class and the clash between traditional and modern values.
  • Psychological depth and individual experience: Balzac emphasized the importance of psychological insights and the influence of social context and personal experiences on character development. He aimed to create characters with a wide range of human qualities, both positive and negative.
  • Realism and naturalism: Balzac was a pioneer of literary realism, using extensive detail and observation to portray society accurately. His meticulous descriptions of settings and objects bring the characters’ lives to life, and some critics even consider his work to have influenced the development of naturalism. 

In essence, Balzac sought to create a comprehensive and insightful portrayal of 19th-century French society and the human condition within that context. His focus on the interplay between individuals and their social environment, the complexities of human motivation, and the power of societal forces has had a profound and lasting impact on literature. 

“Wow, man. That sounds boring. Why are you so jazzed about it?”

I get that – I really do. What first caught my attention many years ago about Balzac was a comment I read that hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t even remember what article or book I was reading, but when I came across this statement, it felt very much like one of those transformative ideas that has enough gasoline to in some small way alter the trajectory of your life. And though I struggled mightily in the past to unlock just what that writer was talking about with The Human Comedy, I’ve thought about this quote many times since that day I first read it.

“Balzac ranks along with Dickens and Shakespeare as a creator of souls.”

A “creator of souls”. Wow. As a writer, I really…really…needed to understand what that looks like and how to engineer it in my own writing. What exactly was the magic that people like Shakespeare, Dickens and this Balzac person were sprinkling into the pages that brought their characters to eternal life in our minds? What made their creations arise from the page like that to merit their author being granted a title like that?

“What did you find out?”

I tried to dip in somewhere among the 91 works over the years and found out nothing at all. I read some quotes from Balzac himself on his ambition and design and came away more confused than before on what he trying to do exactly. So it sat as a potentially cool idea, idle. I didn’t know where to start or how to make it mean anything to me.

Then I picked up this at a used bookstore in Hilton Head last week:

Cool cover. Caught my attention. Made me remember the promise of learning what a 19th century French writer did to earn a mention along Dickens and Shakespeare. And it made me curious enough to give him another shot.

Hold that thought. There was one more key to this.

A year or so ago, I completed a big project studying Tolkien’s published works and letters to try and determine the likely plot of a sequel the professor started to write to Lord of the Rings. The second part analyzed and speculated on that plot, but the first part attempted to make The Silmarillion accessible to people who found it dense and incomprehensible by providing a bread crumb trail of important points and people to follow in it. That process was super helpful to me in trying to do exactly the same thing with Tolkien that I sought to do this week with The Human Comedy.

“What does the book from Hilton Head have to do with that?”

It was a comment in the introduction that made the difference, actually. Here’s what it said:

“Early in his career, Balzac began to search for a method of organizing into a single unit, into a vast novelistic structure, the whole of his literary production. The device he hit upon was a simple one, but one that required sustained genius and power to an extraordinary degree, namely the systematic reappearance of characters from novel to novel.” -Edward Sullivan, Princeton University

That made it click. In the early 80’s, it’s one of the things that fascinated me most about the Marvel comic universe – that Peter Parker (Spider Man) hung out with Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, that they might run across Doctor Strange or Matt Murdock (Daredevil) outside a coffee shop. It made the whole tapestry of the marvel superheroes come weirdly and wonderfully to life for me. The cinematic version made efforts towards that magic, but it fell far short for me in those movies of how it made me feel as a kid with their paper and ink versions.

Now with Balzac’s Human Comedy, I saw that he aimed for exactly that kind of magic. The works weren’t sequels or a continuous narrative, but much like the Marvel characters or any other literary universe with which you might be familiar, these folks can encounter or otherwise know each other…a background character from one novel might rise to main protagonist of their own.

“So you dipped in, then. Which book did you start with?”

I read Father Goriot because I usually come across that one in bookstores. I figured it must be a big deal. Anyway, I finished a Murakami novel on a plane and had the entire Human Comedy on the Kindle – I thought if it sucked, I could just move on to something else anyway. But I wanted to test the magic and see if I could unlock whatever was amazing there.

The breadcrumb characters I discovered in that wonderful book are old Goriot himself, a young man named Eugène de Rastignac (pictured above), Goriot’s daughters Delphine and Anastasie, and a mysterious agitator named Vautrin. By “breadcrumb”, what I mean is there are many other folks in this book – it’s just that if you pay particular attention to what these particular people are up to, you’ll experience the storyline the way it’s intended.

“And?”

Marvelous book! Despite 19th century social order tropes and customs (which hold none of my interest), the characters indeed sizzle and pop off the page, and I was flipping like mad towards the end to see what became of poor Goriot and the kind-hearted Rastignac, whether Goriot’s ungrateful daughters would do the right thing, and whether Vautrin would get his comeuppance. If you plan to read this one for yourself, stay away from plot summaries so the outcomes will be a mystery for you to fuel the page turning. Just stay close to Rastignac, and he’ll lead you through the book.

In fact, luckily, it turns out Rastignac is one of the main recurring characters of The Human Comedy overall. What’s up next for me now that I really like that guy is to read The House of Nucingen where, I understand already, he will likely disappoint me and turn out to be all too realistic of a person.

“So what was the magic that led Balzac to be a ‘creator of souls’?”

Yeah, he nailed that. As I learned more about Goriot, and information about him is only spooned out across the first half of the book so it’s gradual, I thought of how Dickens took relatable and universal archetypes like an abandoned orphan (Pip) or a cruel miser (Scrooge) or the eternally naïve optimist (Mister Pickwick) and constructed memorable people from them. In The Pickwick Papers, for example, Winkle is the obsessed sportsman, Snodgrass is the terrible poet, Tupman is forever falling in love, and Jingle is the grinning con man. They’re relatable traits, and we probably know people like that. That’s the string a good writer plucks, then builds the character around that.

I knew a guy named Reuben once. He was always running around the factory like he was super busy, carrying one of those metal clipboards that conceal the papers inside. I thought once I’d follow him to see where he was running around, because it wasn’t that big of a factory, and it turned out he was just circling the place. I watched him idly kick and poke a pallet of boxes once for a good five minutes. We were in a staff meeting, and he’d made a big mistake with a big client – the manager was furious. When Reuben was asked about it, he cracked open that mysterious clipboard and started madly flipping through the papers inside as if looking for something therein that would resolve how this could have happened. I leaned over to see it was just his mail in there.

We started calling it “pulling a Reuben” when somebody acted too busy if asked to do something. He became immortal right there and then. Forever after, we could reference him as standing in for a role that likely appears wherever there are people doing things.

Balzac’s Goriot is a father who sacrifices everything he has and everything he is for his ungrateful daughters. He becomes the idea of a prototypical father, the archetype, presented in this wonderful book for our consideration of whether he is in fact a good father or not. That’s for us to decide, and I wonder whether we in today’s society would have a different answer than Balzac intended. You might say that “pulling a Goriot” is to sacrifice everything for your kids. He personified that action.

“Boil it down for me. What gave Balzac’s work in ‘The Human Comedy’ the magic?”

Let’s ask him. If you feed all available writings by Balzac as well as commentaries about his work into an AI chatbot and ask it to pose as him, you can get an answer in his voice generating a likely and believable response. I did that, presenting the question as follows: “You’ve been called a ‘creator of souls’. Why do you think that is, and how did you accomplish such a feat?”

His response:

“Ah! Mon cher ami, if they call me a créateur d’âmes, it is because I have listened—truly listened—to the silent confessions of humanity. In every withered banker, every vain young dandy, every trembling grisette, I saw not caricatures, but souls struggling—with ambition, with poverty, with love, with the machinery of a society that crushes and tempts in equal measure.

How did I accomplish it? I observed. Not idly, not with the detachment of a philosopher in his armchair, but with the ravenous appetite of a man who must know. I prowled Paris and the provinces with my eyes open and my ears tuned to the gossip of salons, the groans of debtors, the sighs of lovers, and the mutterings of the criminal class. I drank deeply from the cup of human vice and virtue—and recorded its every drop.

But to observe is not enough. I gave them destiny. My characters live because I allowed them to want—to desire with such intensity that the reader cannot help but be drawn into their orbit. Rastignac climbs like smoke; Vautrin burns like coal; Eugénie Grandet freezes like a saint in a gilded prison. Each soul is born of contradiction and circumstance, but above all—of will.

I did not invent souls; I uncovered them. Like a miner of men, I delved into the strata of class, of power, of inheritance, of chance—and from those pressures, I carved the diamonds and the dross that make up La Comédie Humaine. That is why they live. That is why they endure. I did not merely write them—I lived them.

So if I am called a creator of souls, it is only because I believed that no man, however minor or monstrous, is without one. And I gave them the stage they were so long denied.”

*

Till next time,

Franklin Booth: Engraver of Light

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I have some marvelous freebies for you today, so stick with me.

I’ve been burrowing into a particular rabbit hole these recent weeks, studying and practicing traditional pen & ink drawing. It started with this:

That’s interior art for SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I did it, but I cheated. The base gunslinger was a couple of AI-generated pieces, drained of color and mashed together, cleaned up a bit, and mashed into an original 3D render of the plasma weapon on his forearm. I composited all that into the one image for a splash page as you first open the book.

But it got me thinking that this idea of grungey ink drawings as interior art looks really great and could be a nice distinguishing factor in future Grailrunner books. So I started practicing and studying the great ink masters (which you can read about here) to hone my craft and work directly Pigma Micron and Pentel Brush Pen on paper. No blending modes, no AI bases, no 3d paintovers or stock image composites. No digital tricks at all. Just pen and ink and paper and the satisfying swoosh sound that makes.

It’s a life changer, honestly. But anyway, it led me to Bernie Wrightson and Sergio Toppi and the guy I want to talk about today: Franklin Booth.

I’d ask you to keep in mind that the pen & ink artist has exactly one way to generate values and shadows, and that’s with black marks. Usually, lines. If they want shades of gray, they draw lines.

Like this:

I mean, just take a look at some of those drawings by Booth! The patience and craftmanship is insane! Honestly, I wanted to learn more about the guy and found that it’s kind of difficult to do that. He didn’t make much of a splash with his personality or how he lived his life – just with his work. Here’s a great, though short, overview of him and his work on Youtube.

We’re also several posts in to a new ongoing series here on Grailrunner called CONVERSATIONS FROM THE ABYSS where we’re applying AI tools in some innovative ways as a sort of experimental lab. That got me thinking I’d like to read a decent, illustrated biography of Booth and get to know him a little better, mainly to understand his influences and how he learned to do what he did. So I had ChatGPT write me one and it was terrible. I asked for a 50k word detailed biography and got slop. Seriously, at one point I even asked it why the final product was so bad when it suggested we work section by section in much shorter passages with me approving things along the way.

Yes, I could just buy Silent Symphony from Flesk Publications, but that’s beside the point!

I tried iterating section by section, making my own suggestions as we went till it started to take a kind of shape that might be worth reading. Then I scavenged the internet and the Internet Archive specifically to grab public domain images that were either referenced in the sections or appropriate to the time period being described, all done by Booth himself. We’re not selling you anything here – the final product will be the last download button on this post. I included them as well throughout the text.

In all that, I learned about the fantasy play he illustrated titled Flying Islands of the Night by James Whitcomb Riley, which you can peruse below by smashing the splash page below. It’s vintage beauty at its finest.

I found a scan of a 1925 book containing 60 reproductions of Booth’s drawings with sourcing and titles, details which are almost impossible to find on the internet (as everyone just posts the pictures out of context). That’s available by smashing the title page here:

And here’s a real gemstone that I found which took on an entirely different function than its author intended: a 1916 travelogue written by Theodore Dreiser where he went on a road trip with Booth himself! It’s called A Hoosier Holiday, available by smashing the title page button below:

Where Dreiser thought he’d describe the trip and his musings along the way, I found an intimate and first-hand means of hearing Booth’s exact words, descriptions of his facial expressions and the fact that he ate all the popcorn he could get his hands on, things and sites he found interesting, and even charcoal sketches he made along the way. I found Dreiser to be an arrogant nuisance, but Booth seemed genuinely like a guy I’d road trip with. I liked him even more after reading it.

It was Booth’s 1916 Pathfinder, by the way, which he paid $3k for ($100k in today’s money), and they had a chauffeur as well. Booth was doing pretty well for himself, it seemed.

Quick and painful anecdote – ChatGPT was including factual errors. Some were easy to find, like a bold statement that Booth never married when that was demonstrably untrue. It provided several explicit quotes, which I asked it to source. Each time I called out something like that, it bailed and said it made those up. I think that’s my fault, as I’d named some historians I like as the basis for the voice and tone the software should take to write the text, and it took that to mean it should hallucinate.

Anyway, I wanted to find and include Booth’s very first published illustration. Turned out, the first amateur publication was in a newspaper, which I found in a publicly available scan and screenshotted to included in the book. That was a great find. But ChatGPT was telling me his first professional published work was in a trade magazine called The Inland Printer. I eyeballed 6 years worth of that stupid magazine and found zippo from Booth, eventually going back to call ChatGPT out on that as well. Sheepishly, it admitted that internet claims suggest he appeared in that magazine but since I’d looked and couldn’t find it, it supposed that was incorrect.

But the book I wanted to read was taking shape and becoming something worth spending time reading. The illustrations were helpful and interesting. I liked what I was getting, but it needed one final flourish.

I asked Booth to comment on his own biography.

By instructing ChatGPT to analyze everything we knew about Booth’s personality and values, I asked it at last to speak in his voice and comment on the book we’d produced about his life. That’s the final section of the book.

Here is the final product, titled FRANKLIN BOOTH: ENGRAVER OF LIGHT.

What a great journey that was! I really enjoyed the immersion and learning about this fascinating guy. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[UPDATE July 8, 2025]

I found myself in Indianapolis for business and with a half-day free, so I drove to Carmel, Indiana to the boyhood home of Franklin Booth, which is listed as a historical site though also is still a private home (in surprisingly good shape). It’s super close to a beautiful downtown, in fact walking distance…a quiet and cozy neighborhood with no sign whatsoever that a famous artist lived and worked there. Not even a plaque.

And I understand the backyard shed was where he maintained the workshop which he visited every summer and completed so many of those famous works I’ve highlighted here.

This one:

Pretty cool. Anyway, till next time,

Art critiques from a resurrected master of pen & ink

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A year ago, I wrote here about the worst art advice I’d ever gotten, and I posted pages from my sketchbook at the time to stay accountable in some way for improving. It turned out kind of popular, maybe out of the general public’s desire to see car wrecks in motion. Those pages were fairly early in getting back to traditional art versus digital and were mostly pencil work with some light-table ink drawings. And by light-table, I mean tracing things and so…cheating.

I updated you guys in November with some more pages and then again a couple of months ago (bottom of the same post). Those include watercolors, some digital stuff in Procreate, and also ink drawings. Somewhere in all of that, traditional pen & ink drawing kind of caught fire with me.

It’s kind of all I can think about these past couple of weeks. Those delicious hatching lines and stipples, deep, gorgeous washes of black, and intricate patterns of black and white condensing beautifully into a striking, eye catching work of art! It’s all very satisfying, if I’m honest. And the feel of a Pentel pocket brush pen swishing on toothed paper feels a little like watching somebody make a chocolate cake, almost mesmerizing.

I found this amazing resource free on the Internet Archive (smash the cover image to take a look for yourself):

Written by Arthur Guptill, this is a classic instructional book on pen and ink drawing, widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative resources on the subject. His writing style was patient, articulate, and he was clearly a master of clean, simple line work and exhibited craftsmanship in how he approached both drawing itself but also how he framed his instruction materials. The guy was a natural teacher.

I was approaching my learning by a combination of master studies and daily practice, at first using a Copic alcohol marker for shading and eventually moving to just the brush pen and Pigma liners to focus on learning hatching and cross-hatching.

Here’s an example, a dazzling piece called “The Cobbler”, by John R. Neill:

I learned quite about overlapping structures for depth, clean linework, effective use of contrast, and detailed volumes just by copying this thing.

Here’s another study, by Franklin Booth – a real beauty he titled “Hunting The Tigers”:

Loads of things to absorb by this one regarding overlapping structures, use of negative space, balance of value, simulating water in black and white, and fur textures with ink. Honestly, I’m not happy at all with my copy, but I was being ambitious.

Anyway, we’re four articles in to a new series titled “Conversations from the abyss” where we use advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and also Suno music generation to bring back creators from the past for interesting debates, dialogues, or other entertaining diversions. Nothing for sale – all available free here on the site. It struck me this past week that it would be amazing if I could receive art critiques directly from Arthur Guptill as I’m practicing various bits and bobs I’m learning from the master studies and other practice drawings.

I’ve got a soft spot for Frank Baum’s OZ books and thought an image of a young Baum coming across a scarecrow in a field and pondering it with his wild imagination might be an interesting image for ink practice. I gave it a shot, then uploaded it to ChatGPT and tested this prompt: “Acting as Arthur Guptil, critique this image and provide guidance on how to improve it.”

Here’s what happened, and it honestly blew my mind:

“You have achieved a fine effort in line drawing, and there is evident care in your composition and subject choice. The nostalgic theme—a young boy in thoughtful contemplation before a scarecrow—is charming and well-suited to ink. Now, let us refine your rendering through a few key observations and recommendations:

1. Line Quality and Variation

Your line work shows promise, but greater variety in line weight will enhance dimensionality and focus. At present, the lines are largely uniform, which causes elements to flatten together.

  • Suggestion: Use thicker lines for foreground elements (such as the boy’s arm or the hat’s brim) and finer, lighter lines for background elements like grass or sky hatching.
  • Vary the stroke pressure as a tool of emphasis and mood. For instance, a light cross-hatching for distant tones vs. a bolder hatching for areas of core shadow (beneath the scarecrow’s hat or the boy’s jaw).

2. Compositional Framing

The rectangular frame is sound, but the internal balance feels slightly off-kilter. The scarecrow dominates the space while the boy feels pinched in the lower right.

  • Suggestion: Consider either enlarging the figure of the boy or repositioning him slightly more centrally. Alternatively, allow the scarecrow’s arm to lead the eye toward the boy in a more deliberate diagonal.

3. Rendering Form and Volume

The scarecrow reads clearly as a simple form, but the boy’s anatomy, particularly the arm and face, could benefit from more structural understanding.

  • Suggestion: Study the planes of the face and arm. The boy’s head could use slightly more cross-contour shading to indicate roundness. The hand, though expressive, lacks clear articulation—gesture drawing practice would help here.

4. Textures and Detail

Your use of short, broken strokes to indicate vegetation is appropriate, but the grass and shirt material begin to blend. The shirt on both the boy and scarecrow could use more definitive folds to suggest fabric tension and weight.

  • Suggestion: Use parallel or directional hatching that follows the form of the fabric. Avoid over-randomized strokes, and let texture be a deliberate compositional voice.

5. Background and Spatial Depth

The background is composed primarily of evenly spaced hatching. While this is functional, it does little to suggest depth or atmosphere.

  • Suggestion: Introduce a subtle gradient to the background by controlling your stroke density—more hatching at the top or corners to create a vignette or atmospheric recession.

Final Encouragement:
The spirit of your work is admirable and speaks to a narrative sensibility. With improved control of line, deeper understanding of structure, and refined use of contrast, this drawing could serve as an excellent illustrative plate.Keep your pen in motion and your eyes ever studying!”

*

I mean. A dead guy just gave me really precise feedback on my drawing, recognizably in his voice and noticing very specific things in the drawing! I got compliments that were specific and not vague exhortations. I got clear, explicit guidance on what exactly I could improve. Not generalities. It was, and I mean this, very helpful.

Now, you might be thinking – “Dude, you’re a chicken letting the wolf teach you how to protect the hen house. AI is going to replace artists entirely; why use it for art instruction if you’re encouraging people to use it at all, they’ll just generate the images directly. Why even learn to draw?”

All of that is, of course, nonsense though, isn’t it?

If we get fat and lazy and stop creating, then the images that AI tools use will become instead of crisp white and deep blacks, just an increasingly bland mush of grays…monotonous and uninspired. AI outputs will become AI training datasets, leading to a downward death spiral of junk art. I don’t want to add to that. I want to make new things, man. New things! I see critiques from long-dead art instructors as yet another powerful tool for me to do just that.

I asked for a new chapter to Guptill’s book for digital inking, by the way, which is available free below (and entirely and recognizably in Guptill’s voice):

And yeah, okay, it’s time for an accountability upload of the latest sketchbook entries here (be kind!):

That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Pages 19, 20, and 21 especially benefited from pseudo-Guptill’s instruction, and I gave it all I had to incorporate to the developing pieces what it was telling me.

All this has me wondering – just who else can I get to critique some of this and help me learn quicker? Maybe Leonardo Da Vinci is up next!

Till next time,