I’m told my reading habits are a little out there. I get that. I do.
However, it intrigues me that in almost any field of human endeavor, there is a specific type of personality that thrives on breaking its rules and forging incandescent new ways of doing things. If you’re new here, that’s almost entirely what we do here – find, spotlight, analyze, and celebrate innovation in the creative process.
So I was reading this book about 1960’s beach music:
I don’t like that sort of music at all. I especially detest men singing falsetto and lyrics obsessing over the teenage emotional range. However, I had heard that the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, was considered the greatest and most influential album in music history. Knowledgeable people say that. I wanted to understand why in the world that would be, given its niche genre, its terrible album cover and name, and the fact that it isn’t chock full of top 10 hits.
What was so special? And once I knew that, I would of course ask: what inspired it?
I’ll cut to the chase since the answers to those questions don’t actually comprise my point today. I want to extend some of these lessons over to mythmaking and storytelling since that’s my main jam. (If you’re into this crossover of music and storytelling, I wrote about this sort of thing in an article called “Aesthetic Puzzles: When Bach Met Shakespeare”, which you can go catch here.)
Why is Pet Sounds a big deal?
Brian Wilson was the main creative driver behind the 1960’s-era pop band, the Beach Boys, and took a break from touring in 1965 to focus on creating “the greatest rock album ever made”. Till then, their songs were bubble-gum melodies of no real sophistication and lyrics aimed like a piledriver at teenagers having fun, especially in and around the rapidly-growing fad of surfing. Wilson was enamored with the “wall of sound” production techniques of music producer, Phil Spector, which involved using echo chambers and physical studio arrangements augmenting studio manipulation of recorded tracks to generate robust, layered textures of sounds that would come across richly on a jukebox. Spector’s stated logic behind his own innovation was:
“I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record.”
So it was mono (versus stereo) playback technology and the limited fidelity of speakers available at the time that prompted Spector to layer sounds together and experiment with ways of making the sounds more textured. Wilson felt the Beatles album, Rubber Soul contained some of the most mature lyrics yet for the band, and from these two launch points, he wanted to get more emotional with his lyrics and more experimental with his production techniques to surpass them all.
Wilson wound up innovating in all areas, and indeed developing intriguing ways of making the studio itself an instrument: combining, for example, multiple instruments simultaneously into a blended and new quality that sounded nothing like any of them. He introduced novel instruments like bicycle bells, a variation on the theremin, among others, in a rogue recording marathon of studio musicians while the actual band was out touring. Nobody had done that before, or even went off the trail of a small ensemble like that to make an album that couldn’t actually be played live. He also experimented with chord voicings, meaning how different chords are brought together (a little out of phase, for example, so there’s a slightly noticeable tremor) or avoiding a definitive key signature. By all accounts, Wilson’s efforts with the band surpassed anything Spector had done or would do. He took the inspiration and ran with it.
Studio musicians involved said of the time that they knew something very different was happening. Something important. It was interesting to me, reading what it felt like for the other guys there, the ones just hired to do a thing and realizing they were part of something.
So the idea to hold in your head then, for my point to land, is this: an approach towards recording music where all manner of frequencies and qualities of instruments and voices are layered over each other in a rich texture of sounds that you could listen to a multitude of times with headphones on and the volume turned up and still catch new things.
Texture. That’s the thing to remember. Innovating with texture.
What’s all this got to do with storytelling?
I’ve spent the last 3 years working on an approach to storytelling and tabletop roleplaying that I engineered to be as innovative as I could manage. I tried to rethink how narrative games like Dungeons & Dragons function and streamline everything down to core essentials.
“The awe and danger of exploration inside the covers of a book.” That was my compass. It’s here, called SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I’m not trying to sell you that right now, though. I want to talk about using it as a recording studio like Wilson did.
This idea now of texture and layered elements building a rich tapestry to transform a familiar art form into something different and new prodded a new question for me:
Can the elements of mythology and storytelling play the same role for the written word that musical notes, chords, and rhythms play? Instead of playing for the ear a rich tapestry like that, can archetypes and themes be arranged to play for the emotions?
Here are the commonly accepted themes of mythology and folklore in a table, arranged into numbered entries appropriate for a roll of D100 dice:
Here are the common character types of mythology, similarly arranged:
And finally, here are the common situational types of mythology:
SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS is designed in a similar manner, with appendix tables for all manner of characters, encounters, and places arranged along the 100-scale like this, appropriate for idle shopping, dice rolls, or use of the bibliomancy mechanic core to the book’s function. The concept with the book is to forge a solo adventure and tell yourself an amazing, resonating story.
The analogy I’m drawing today is that themes and types of mythology have a power and resonance very much like the comforting, stable floor of bass in music. A deep, low melody on bass grounds a melody and makes it richer, makes it seem more important. That’s how myths work. I’m imagining incorporating elements from these tables into a solo tabletop adventure to make them play the same role…
…to summon them so they must work their magic.
I picture roleplaying game rulesets like the one in the BOOK OF LOTS as recording studios: an engine of creation that wasn’t available to previous generations that we can bend to dazzling new heights like Wilson did.
I see elements of oracle tables like those in BOOK OF LOTS or Ironsworn, Starforged, the Dungeon Dozen volumes 1 and 2, and other amazing sourcebooks as chords and notes.
And I see the solo player as a crazy artist, just messing with things to see what new comes out of it all. Telling new stories. Jamming new jams.
My head is swimming at the thought of this. I wonder if it’s too much coffee or if there’s something to be said, truly, about combinations of mythic elements arranged like music. Intriguing idea for me today, at least, to bring it to you today.
One of my first obsessions was Larry Niven‘s science fiction. Back in the day, we had a pool table in a big living room where the air conditioning was a box unit embedded in the wall. That AC made the most comforting white noise you could imagine, and to lay on my belly under that pool table reading A HOLE IN SPACE, NEUTRON STAR, CONVERGENT SERIES, RINGWORLD, and PROTECTOR (still on my shelf, so I can read off the names for you) was amazing.
I knew he was extrapolating from hard science. Some of what he was describing was just beyond my reach, but I could make out enough at 10 or 12 years old to know this was fascinating stuff. The naughty bits were cool too, and he seemed to revel in those things. I was his target audience.
Then in probably 1983 or 1984, I talked my mom into buying me his latest: a book called INTEGRAL TREES.
The text on the back hooked me entirely: “Critics long thought Niven would find it difficult to surpass his Hugo-winning novel RINGWORLD – the story of an artificial world, a ribbon of unreasonably strong material 1 million miles wide and 600 million miles long. They were right. Until now, that is. In THE INTEGRAL TREES Niven presents a fully fleshed culture of evolved humans who live without real gravity in the gas torus that rotates about a neutron star. This is the novel his fans have been awaiting!”
I remember flattening the hardback so I could make out the entire cover image to try and understand better what I was reading, and it’s a real dazzler by the great Michael Whelan:
Unfortunately, I didn’t know what an integral sign was shaped like. I didn’t know what a “torus” or a “tuft” was, and even when I looked these things up in the dictionary (dictionary?!), I couldn’t visualize anything in what I was reading beyond people could float weightlessly. Honestly, it seemed this would be awesome if I knew even half of what these sciencey words meant, but I was 10. So I bailed.
I hated that book for years because of that. On a side note, I went on and earned a Physics degree and worked in nuclear engineering for a while, and now I’ve packed in another 40 years beyond when I first laid beneath that pool table to try and visit Niven’s fascinating setting.
For no other reason than I came across its title on Youtube randomly, a couple of weeks ago, it was time to try again.
I’ve finished THE INTEGRAL TREES as well as its unfortunate sequel, THE SMOKE RING, and I believe I’m prepared to describe the visuals and dynamics to you so you can have an easier time than my early self (and from what I understand from reviews and people on-line, many, many others!). I’m a big fan of environmental science fiction like RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, RINGWORLD, RIVERWORLD, SCAVENGER’S REIGN, and others, so if that’s you at all – hang on, here. There’s good and bad, my friend. Good and bad.
Let’s head to a faraway binary star system where a neutron star (Voy) and a Sun-like star play gravity tug-of-war with each other, locking in a dead planet (Gold). The planet had a thick atmosphere once, but that’s being stripped away by the tidal forces making a stable doughnut-shaped gas torus that, believe it or not, is breathable and inhabitable within a specific zone.
Picture yourself climbing up a thick tree canopy, in fact so thick that people have established tunnels through it and built huts inside. It’s easy for you, as gravity seems to be much lighter than you’re accustomed to here on Earth. You come up on an enormous tree limb and realize this is no normal tree. In fact, as you make your way along its length to the trunk, you find the trunk itself is so incredibly large it appears to be a flat wooden wall. It must be 60 miles long to have a trunk this size.
You press on, climbing upwards to find the top of the canopy and hopefully understand better where you are. There’s light up there, sparkling through the leaves. Bright clouds. Maybe a strong wind – you start to feel a stiff breeze against your skin. A wet mist, like that near a big waterfall, tickles the skin of your forearms as you approach the light. You poke your head up through the canopy and:
Indeed, the tree is bigger than you imagined, stretching into the distance above you as far as you can see, with a yellow sun way up there making a halo around its fuzzy far end. You squint and can just make out against the glare that the massive tree is bare along the bulk of its trunk above your canopy here though it appears to have a similar clump of foliage on the opposite side of the trunk from yours though that’s just a thin hair-like black silhouette to you this far away. The entire tree is shaped like a planetoid-sized elongated “S” with you clinging to the bottom left-hand curve of it. Your tree limb juts off the main trunk, though it’s so large a hundred others like you could just live here.
The wind against your face is strong and constant. You can squint against it, but honestly, it’s easier to just look in the opposite direction. That’s when you notice that the very sky here, blue and hazy and beautiful, is full of life and trees just like this one. In fact, perhaps thousands of such trees drift like spokes inside this gas ring and all around you, all oriented radially so they point down at the neutron star far below your feet.
Whale-looking beasts and birds with sharp blades for beaks soar past like airplanes. It’s a bountiful frontier, seemingly ready for hunters. A ball-shaped jungle appears:
In the hazy blue-gray, you see the silhouettes of tall, thin people tied to lines and floating in the sky weightlessly, aiming harpoons at something among the trees of the jungle. It dawns on you that you can stand here atop this mighty tree limb and gaze upwards at them, but were you to climb this trunk, the pull of gravity would fade to nothing.
So you start climbing, because that sounds awesome.
It takes no time at all before you’re having to hold on to knurls and warps in the trunk to avoid drifting into the sky. High above you, people are swimming in a raindrop as big as a sky scraper. It’s a lake, pulled into an elongated sphere by surface tension. And they’re swimming inside!
This place is perhaps the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s what you’re thinking as you make it far enough to at least glimpse the far end of the tree, the end closest to the yellow sun. And you realize as other settlements come into view that they’re upside-down to you! The pull of the yellow sun is their down. The pull of the neutron star below was yours.
Now, here in the center, there is no such thing as down.
The thought of jumping into the sky is too much for you. It’s terrifying, but thrilling. You wave at one of the folks in the distance, and a hazy-gray silhouette waves back. You think you can make it to them. At the very least, they might toss you a rope and pull you in.
What the heck! Maybe that big old whale-thing will take you on its back. Whatever! You jump and don’t look back.
*
Anyway, that’s how I saw it. The setting for these two books is amazing, and it gets better as the main characters start exploring and also as you can better visualize where they’re going and what it would look and feel like.
The issue is the writing. The plot of the first book is great until it isn’t. Way too much time is spent in a location and with a plot point that is just annoying and a terrible decision. I believe if you’re going to make the environment the lead, it’s just wrong-headed to add a host of extraneous sideways quests and traps that don’t really add to the feeling many of us were drawn to in the first place. (I’m taking that advice, by the way, in the book I’m writing now based on this very experience!).
The characterization is nonsense too. Everyone speaks the same, and that’s like Larry Niven. An orbital mechanics textbook would have more interesting dialogue. I especially cringe when people obsess over “mating” and “making babies” in Niven’s effort to head off questions about gene pool viability. Ladies in these books are cartoon-like in their willingness to pleasure or be impregnated by pretty much any male. Again, I was the target audience for that sort of thing back in the day. Now, it’s just embarrassing and silly.
Please avoid the sequel, THE SMOKE RING. No reason to read that. You’re not going to get any more great exploration or insight into the ecosystem. Just the idea of growing a round tree. Everything else is silly and very, very difficult to plod through.
So if the writing is so bad, why am I heartily recommending you read THE INTEGRAL TREES?
You know the answer! This setting is incredible and unforgettable. It would make a compelling anime setting, or a video game background. I just wish a stronger story with better characters inhabited it.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Let me know what you think if you take the plunge too.
Back in October of 2023, we celebrated being at the halfway mark in completing a thrilling new project at Grailrunner. Incredibly, and I can’t believe I’m finally typing this, we’re finished! This puppy is ready to run!
March 1st, 2025, we are launching SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a roleplaying game & supplement aimed at the solo player providing western-themed science fantasy adventures through a bibliomancy oracle.
Who are we?
If you’re new around here, we’re Grailrunner, an indie publisher of science and speculative fiction fiction and games. Our driving passion and special emphasis is on the creative process – innovations in immersive storytelling. Read about that here.
What is the BOOK OF LOTS?
The spirit behind the whole project was to provide the thrill and danger of exploration and adventure inside the cover of a book and to open a fully realized world accessible through the fortune-telling mechanics of bibliomancy.
Contents of this 265 page book include an introduction to a far-future setting (western-themed, so plasma-gauntlet dueling cowboys delving pocket worlds), a simple, streamlined set of rules enabling a player to use no ruleset at all or even dice outside of the book, and a 40,000+ word set of short passages, consulted via bibliomancy to judge outcomes and events, adding story prompt flavor to judgements. Also included are a map and atlas descriptions of locations in the setting, 13 traditional nested oracle tables to further drive events in the story and a detailed index.
How does it work?
We walk you through it in a prologue with a detailed Quick Start example, but the general idea is to use the setting descriptions, the atlas and map, and the oracles tables to build out the skeleton of a character and story following a framework we call the Five Questions. Then, either use the roleplaying game rules of your choice (like D&D or Free League’s Year Zero system) or use the barebones, streamlined rules of this book to start experiencing your story.
Either once per in-game day or as you see fit, consult the lots by holding a specific question in your mind and turning to a random passage on a random page, locating a 1 -3 line passage (called a “lot”) and its number. A question might be “What will I find on the other side of this hill?” or “What happens when I try to climb the walls of these ruins?”
The rules provide for YES/NO answers as well as more sophisticated outcome judgements, but, more importantly, add a layer of story prompt-style chaos and randomness to what happens.
Shoot me a comment here on this article if you’d like to know more or if you’re interested in a review copy.
Since we’re a teensie little indie publisher, it’s super hard to get attention and drum up interest in new products, especially if they’re very different or not related to dungeons. If you’re willing to post something for yourself linking to this announcement, it would be tremendously appreciated!
Every little kind word helps!
*
Anyway, that’s the big announcement. I hope you can feel some of the excitement here on our side. This has been an incredible and life-changing amount of work. It’s nice to start telling people about it.
If you haven’t read the first part of this double-header, click here for part one. This is the final wrap-up of a two-part deep dive into the ancient Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, to determine whether there was indeed a booby trap at the heart of the battle as some historical sources suggest.
Welcome back to our series called Inspirations From History!
The purpose of part one was to set the stage for why the battle happened and put its importance in context. We also met the key players: Constantine and Maxentius, and roughed out a psychological profile to probe the mystery at hand. If Maxentius really was a wily coward, superstitious and cautious, who relied on subterfuge and undermining enemy forces for victory, then yeah – he might have laid a booby trap. Instead, if Constantine was just lucky and bold and a good propagandist willing to use superstition and religion to advance his agenda and to inspire his men, then maybe no – the booby trap could have just been his insulting re-framing of the battle afterwards.
Well, which was it?
Pretty sure I have a good answer to that. There are 8 key historical sources to examine, all with solid claims to people who were there, spoke with those who were there, or otherwise had access to credible sources. I got my hands on all of them.
(1) Latin Panegyric 12, from an anonymous author and dating to 313 AD, only a year after the battle and representing the words of a speech made directly to Constantine
The author describes Maxentius as growing gloomy and bitter at Constantine’s approach, rushing into a foolish formation, and panicking in his retreat. The narrowness of the bridge hindered the retreat, and the river “snatched up their leader himself in its whirlpool and devoured him when he attempted in vain to escape with his horse and distinctive armor by ascending the opposite bank“.
No mention of a booby trap.
(2) On the Deaths of the Persecutors by Lactantius, dating to 315 AD
Chapter 44 describes Maxentius as staying behind in Rome at the games while his men fought the battle until he was shamed to ride out to fight and received what he thought was a favorable oracle. “Led by this response to the hopes of victory, he went to the field. The bridge in his rear was broken down. At sight of that, the battle grew hotter.” Then on seeing he was losing, Maxentius “fled towards the broken bridge; but the multitude pressed on him. He was driven headlong into the Tiber.”
Still no mention of a booby trap, nor even Maxentius scheming by doing anything to the bridge.
(3) Ecclesiastical History (between 312-324 AD) & Life of Constantine (337 AD), both by Eusebius and both would have been read by Constantine
In the older work, Eusebius says Maxentius and his men drowned “when he fled” as he “passed through the river which lay in his way, over which he had formed a bridge with boats, and thus prepared the means of his own destruction“. Further, “Thus, then, the bridge over the river being broken…immediately the boats with the men disppeared in the depths“. No mention of a booby trap here either, but a casual reference that might be made more clear as we go here. Stick with me on this longer quote below.
In his retelling of the story years later, the same author says of Maxentius, quoting more fully since it’s what inspired this entire quest):
“…when in his flight before the…forces of Constantine, he essayed to cross the river which lay in his way, over which making a strong bridge of boats, he had framed an engine of destruction, really against himself, but in the hope of ensnaring thereby him who was beloved by God.” Later, “…one might say he had made a pit and fallen into the ditch which he had made. His mischief will return upon his own head..under divine direction, the machine erected on the bridge, with the ambuscade concealed therein, giving way unexpectedly before the appointed time, the bridge began to sink and the boats with the men in them went…to the bottom.”
Constantine knew Eusebius well, and they would have definitely discussed this battle and its details, especially with Eusebius writing the guy’s biography. I can’t escape this account – the guy clearly says there was a booby trap.
Is that the answer, then?
Unclear so far. Let’s keep going. The other, equally old sources said nothing about it, in fact just the opposite.
(4) Latin Panegyric 4, by Nazarius, dating to 321 AD
Here, Maxentius is said to have arrayed his forces with disadvantage because he was “mad with fear“, in a “desperate state of mind and confused in counsel since he chose a location for the fight that would cut off escape and make dying a necessity.” The author’s first speech (now lost) would have covered more details, but he describes at least here the Tiber “filled with heaps of bodies” and an unbroken line of carnage “moving along with weakened effort among high-piled masses of cadavers, its waters barely forcing their way through“.
No mention of a booby trap here, just a panicked retreat. Constantine wasn’t actually present when this speech was made, but he would have surely received the text and, I imagine, people who saw the battle would have been there to hear it and challenge anything said that was incorrect.
(5) Origin of Constantine by an anonymous author, dating to 337 AD
This account, though brief, sums up the battle as follows: “…when Constantine had arrived at the city, Maxentius, leaving the city, chose a plain above the Tiber in which to fight. There, defeated, with all his men put to flight, he perished amidst the straits of the people who were surrounding him, thrown from his horse into the river.”
No mention even of the bridge itself, nor in fact a collapse or breaking of the bridge. It just says he was thrown from his horse in a presumed retreat. Definitely no booby trap mentioned here.
(6) The Caesars by Aurelius Victor, dating to 361 AD
A short recount from this source describes the battle as follows:
“Maxentius, growing more ruthless by the day, finally advanced with great difficulty from the city to Saxa Rubra, about nine miles away. His battle line was cut to pieces and as he was retreating in flight back to Rome he was trapped in the very ambush he had laid for his enemy at the Milvian Bridge while crossing the Tiber in the sixth year of his tyranny.”
Strangely, the recount of this senior bureaucrat in imperial service who possibly had access to good sources mentions an “ambush” but no booby trap. Eusebius had mentioned an ambush but said it was hidden by the booby trap.
(7) Epitome of the Caesars by an anonymous author, dating to the 360’s AD
This recount presents a very different twist to the story:
“Maxentius, while engaged against Constantine, hastening to enter from the side a bridge of boats constructed a little above the Milvian Bridge, was plunged into the depth when his horse slipped; his body, swallowed up by the weight of his armor, was barely recovered.“
No booby trap here either, though it’s thirty years later and this author is first to suggest Maxentius was possibly headed TO the battle, crossing the intact bridge, when his horse slipped. I can’t give any credence to this one due to its later date and its crucial variance from much older sources.
(8) New History by Zosimus, dating to the 5th & early 6th century but with access to much older sources
In part one of this series, I quoted the Zosimus passage describing the booby trap and its iron fastenings. The author continues describing the battle: “As long as the cavalry kept their ground, Maxentius retained some hopes, but when they gave way, he tied with the rest over the bridge into the city. The beams not being strong enough to bear so great a weight, they broke; and Maxentius, with the others, was carried with the stream down the river.“
So even though Zosimus had just described the booby trap as real, he doesn’t credit its triggering with killing Maxentius. Instead, it’s that the “beams” gave way.
Okay, so what’s the answer? Was there a booby trap?
No, it would seem there was not. Since most sources agree it was a rushed retreat and collapse of a temporary bridge, that’s likely what happened.
Where did the booby trap story originate, then?
This is something I learned as I researched this series: Constantine was a shrewd manipulator and propagandist. He had leveraged a supernatural vision before, and that wasn’t a Christian god. He leveraged a vision at Milvian. He painted himself as divine inevitability. This fellow knew Eusebius (a bishop) and the explosive new religion of Christianity as what they could do for him. It was very much to his benefit that he be the hero and liberator versus a wicked, scheming coward in Maxentius as this story was locked into history.
Constantine made it up. That’s my conviction after poring through these sources. He just made it up. And I’m here two millenia later half-believing it.
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Anyway, this has been intriguing for me and a long-time interest I enjoyed researching for you. Apologies for going long on it, but the background seemed important. Let me know what you think and if you believe the question is settled or not.
It’s October 28, 312 AD. Beyond this bridge lies Rome. You won’t even have to fight inside its gates. Just enter, and the empire is yours…the entire known world as you see it. It isn’t even a real bridge; your enemy destroyed the permanent one. What’s there now is temporary: made of wooden pontoons. The only thing between you and rule over every part of the greatest empire ever known is one army, commanded by a devious, superstitious foe who wins battles by bribing and persuading his enemy’s forces in the dead of night and hiding behind seiged walls. He’s joining battle on this side of the river, with his back against the water to signal there will be no retreats. No running.
This will be the end of the scheming and intrigue. Before the end of the day, one of you will ride into the city to be welcomed by the Senate. And they will welcome whoever comes to them. That’s how they are.
You would remake the empire, granting freedom and re-defining who the people aspire to become. You would create an optimistic world and encourage new ways of thinking, ushering in a great and brave era of humanity. Your enemy is vile, the son of a liar and a coward. He offers the empire only more of the same internal wars and greed, persecutions and oppression that almost took Rome down a generation before.
You’ve had a vision today. It isn’t your first omen, but it is the greatest: a mighty burning sign in the sky. “By this sign, conquer!” A voice in your head, promising your victory. You’ve had your soldiers paint it on their shields. They marvel at your confidence.
It’s time. Waiting only empowers the enemy. Ride and fight! The Battle of Milvian Bridge begins!
The Arch of Constantine frieze showing the battle (at bottom)
That was the stage set on October 28 in the year 312, a battle that decided how world history would play out for the next two thousand years. It helped shape civilization as we know it, and even impacted how we think and see the world today. The story has everything you could want in a thriller: palace intrigue and power schemes, a superstitious emperor shamed by his people into abandoning his seiged city walls, a supernatural vision, and a brutal, violent conflict ending in the drowned screams of the defeated army.
But some ancient sources such as church historian, Eusebius in Life of Constantine say there was a booby trapped bridge that decided the battle.
Zosimumus, for example, an imperial bureaucrat writing quite some time later but drawing from older sources, said it clearly in his New History:
“Maxentius threw a bridge over the Tiber, which was not of one entire piece, but divided into two parts, the center of the bridge being made to fasten with iron pins, which might be drawn out upon occasion. He gave orders to the engineers that as soon as they saw the army of Constantine upon the juncture of the bridge, they should draw out the iron fastenings that the enemy who stood upon it might fall into the river.”
When I learned that, I just had to go deep to know the truth. I had to get inside the minds of some of the key players, especially the guy that lost that battle and would have set the trap (if there was one).
How about I present the facts to you and we’ll see what you think. Welcome back to our series: Inspirations From History!
A little background?
Diocletian
It all orbits around this guy here. His name was Diocletian, and in some ways he was the Abraham Lincoln of his day. On May 1st, in the year 305 AD on a parade ground in front of his army, he retired as emperor and was the very first to do so. He was ill and just wanted to tend to his vegetable gardens on the Adriatic shore. This was a shock to the system because he was the stabilizing force for the empire when it had all but shattered to its shakey core for 70 years before he came to power. In fact, during a 50-year period before Diocletian, there were no fewer than 60 claimants to the throne in a terrifying time of anarchy, intrigue, civil strife, plague, and foreign invasions.
And now he wanted to tend vegetables.
One important way he had stabilized the empire was a shared-power framework called the Tetrarchy. Although Diocletian had remained the ultimate and senior honcho, he primarily governed the eastern portion of the empire with the senior title (Augustus), aided by a junior (a schemer named Galerius, titled Caesar). His counterpart in the western portion was a fellow named Maximian (also titled Augustus), aided by his own junior: Constantius (titled Caesar).
Here’s what that all looked like:
Maximian
And here’s Maximian. When Diocletian announced he was retiring, he forced this poor guy to retire too. And the surprises just kept coming…
This was the new tetrarchy Diocletian announced on that parade ground. Constantius and Galerius got their promotions, but Constantine, the son of Constantius, was standing on the tribunal with these guys expecting to be named Caesar. That was the whole point of his previous 10 years, being groomed for this moment. He’d served under Galerius all but a captive to enable this promotion to happen. It was what he’d been told his whole life would happen.
Then it didn’t. Because of Galerius. This guy here:
Galerius
Galerius hated Constantine, and had convinced old Diocletian that the tall, handsome and well-liked young man was too ambitious and wouldn’t respect authority. So he got passed up. That fellow, Maximinus who got the Caesar job in the east was Galerius’s nephew: a puppet placeholder till Galerius’s young son was old enough to take the title. Constantine will be commanding one side at the Battle of Milvian Bridge; it’s with his perspective that I opened this article above.
Constantine
Maximian had a son, too, a devious one who was also expecting to rise to the title of Caesar, a fellow named Maxentius. Not only was Maximian forced into retirement, but his son got passed over as well.
Because of Galerius.
Maxentius
Galerius had convinced old Diocletian that Maxentius was insolent and unfit for rule, so he maneuvered his henchman, Severus into the Caesar job. And with all that intrigue, scheming Galerius wound up Augustus over the eastern empire with his nephew below him and a croney in waiting as Caesar in the west. Quite the layer cake, that Galerius! A true child of Rome.
So everyone went along with that?
Oh, no. Constantius was the only one not tied to Galerius here, and he did a thing.
That Summer, Constantius summoned his son, Constantine to his service in a campaign against the Picts. When Constantius died of natural causes about a year afterwards, Constantine was presented to the army as Augustus. Not the junior title of Caesar, mind you. Augustus: Severus’s job. Galerius was furious with this, refusing to acknowledge that title but allowing him as Severus’s junior, Caesar.
Constantine went along for the time being, pleased with his insertion into the Imperial College. But Constantine’s success here infuriated old Maximian’s son, Maxentius, who took advantage of some unrest in Rome due to new taxes and got himself an elevated title (“First Citizen”), an act that even moreso infuriated Galerius. Maxentius hated his father, but knew it would make his claim to some kind of authority legitimate if his dad came back from retirement as Augustus (yes, Severus’s title). The Roman senate went along with it despite the lack of Galerius’s backing.
Galerius ordered Severus to suppress this uprising through force in early 307, and it was in this battle outside Rome that Maxentius did something very interesting, very effective, and highly relevant to the question of whether there was a booby trap on Milvian Bridge.
He bribed and persuaded Severus’s soldiers to switch sides and just drop the seige of Rome. I imagine this as happening around campfires in the dead of night, with Severus waking up at sunrise to the bulk of his army gone. Severus was taken captive, forced to abdicate, and was dead by September.
Maxentius was fast becoming a hero to the people of Rome. Crucially while Maximian was away negotiating with Constantine to keep him out of the conflicts (granting Constantine the cherished Augustus title), Maxentius faced Galerius himself who had crossed the Julian Alps to deal with this himself. Galerius was a fierce and renowned general with a glory-filled career in war, and was headed straight for Rome to settle all this and bring order back to his marvelous plans for the empire under his rule.
And Maxentius did it again. His agents infiltrated Galerius’s camp at Interamna and worked the invading soldiers with promises of rewards and promotions, and insistence that Galerius was in the wrong attacking his own son-in-law. And it worked again, with so many of Galerius’s men defecting that he was forced to retreat and leave Italy entirely without even fighting a battle!
When Maximian returned, he was dumbfounded to find his own son had declared himself Augustus and had made Maximian’s role obsolete. Maxentius ran his father out of town, driving him into the arms of Constantine for protection.
Couldn’t the old guy that retired come back and fix all this?
Galerius did, in fact, meet Diocletian in November 308 with Maximian in attendance as well to try and convince the old man to come out of retirement and use his prestige and reputation to fix the world they’d broken. But he wasn’t leaving his cabbages and proposed a revised tetrarchy that everyone should have known wouldn’t work. He named a loyal lieutenant of Galerius’s (Licinius) as Severus’s replacement Augustus, demoting Constantine to Licinius’s Caesar, and charging Licinius with putting down Maxentius. Maximian was told to retire again.
It isn’t worth diagramming that, because both Constantine and Maxentius were forces of nature that couldn’t have cared less about Diocletian’s new framework.
So we’re ready for the Battle of Milvian Bridge then?
Yes, we are. By 310, Maximian, after trying to spread a false rumor that Constantine was dead to declare himself Augustus once again, had hung himself. Galerius and Diocletian both died in 311. Licinius wound up dying at Constantine’s hands a little more than a decade later and isn’t important to the story or its impact anyway. Maximinus died of natural causes a year later and isn’t important to the story either.
In 312, Constantine struck like lightning in a raid through Italy bound straight for Rome to take out Maxentius for good. Whoever won that, honestly, got the empire with just some loose ends to clean up.
What happened?
Before the battle was done, Maxentius had left the city walls (though he’d won two previous seiges through guile), lost the fight, tried to retreat (in a panic?), and drowned in the Tiber along with much of his army. His pontoon bridge had collapsed. Take a look at that stone frieze above on the Arch of Constantine to see a contemporary visual for that. It’s Constantine driving men on horses into the river.
Twenty years later, a man named Eusebius who knew Constantine personally reported that Milvian Bridge had a booby trap. That was what fascinated me about this whole story. Yet the sources don’t agree, and the oldest sources don’t mention a booby trap at all.
Maxentius was devious and could very well have planned such a trap, even trying to lure Constantine’s forces into it. And Constantine was a master of propaganda, claiming kinship with gods, which could have persuaded Maxentius’s minion in charge of a booby trap to trigger it instead against his own master.
I had to know. WAS there a booby trap at all?
In part 2, I’ll try and get you an answer on that.
Back in May, I posted some musings on this site about what I called bad art advice that I’d gotten when I was in Middle School.
“The real world doesn’t have outlines – draw what you see.”
Weird, I know, but I struggled so much with that I gave up drawing altogether. I get that it should be straightforward advice that every burgeoning artist SHOULD in fact receive and, indeed, follow. I get that it’s true and obvious and OUGHT to have been helpful. Just wasn’t how I reacted, unfortunately.
I’ve come to realize that is just a first step.
I recounted how back in October 2023, I’d come across a lifechanging book series called Sketching From The Imagination and an art magazine called ImagineFX that had me rejuvenated to start it all over again, on fire with cool pictures in my head and a spirit to truly give it a go this time. I shared my sketchbook at the time (shudder!) a little over a half-year in, to be accountable to folks here for improving.
Another phase of things had opened up with an enlightening quote from the genius artist, Kim Jung Gi that said:
“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”
I liked his emphasis on practicing reproducing reference images, only from different angles and perspectives so you can learn their forms in three dimensional space. Over time, your visual library carries enough shape and texture language to work directly without reference. Very nice. You see, I have a complicated relationship with the use of reference images in creating art. The dream has always been to sit down with a piece of paper or a blank screen and summon fantasy and science fiction imagery from nothing – not to robotically reproduce an image in front of me. Over and over, every artist I was seeing on Youtube or reading in interviews, they were all using reference images. I had this inner voice saying “if I wanted to reproduce an image, I’d take a picture of it”. Kim Jung Gi’s advice offered a different relationship with reference imagery.
So it’s been over a year now. Keeping up the practice frequency to at least a half-hour each night if at all possible. Even when I’m bone tired after work and would rather stare at history documentaries or old spy movies (or train movies -those are awesome).
Anyway, somewhere along the way, this happened:
Don’t ask, my friend. I just thought I’d try watercolor painting and this guy showed up. I call him Barney. My first attempt. I hadn’t planned on getting obsessed with watercolors – it was Peter Han‘s fault. Was watching Peter draw something amazing, and he pulled out a little travel palette set. The smooth and striking combination of ink and colored wash fascinated me. Strangely, as I submerged into the very deep and mesmerizing well of watercolor painting in magazines, books, interviews, and tutorials, a new, possibly ultimate and final step has started to take shape.
Watercolor pigment does what it feels like doing on the paper. It moves around. Crashes. Blossoms. Ignores your feeble mortal attempts to control it. But it makes incredible gradients and blooms and textures like nothing else. And its mightiest trick, almost its entire reason for being, is to capture light. I’m talking about the translucency of a green leaf in summer with sunlight bleeding through, the broken sunbeam dancing on a marble floor, the ghostly and serene reflections of clouds and seafoam on the beach once the wave goes out. Google “Steve Hanks” and Thomas Schaller to see what I mean.
Reflecting on Indian Beach (Steve Hanks)Foggy Morning – Maine (Thomas Schaller)
The more this got in my head, the more I began to realize there even WAS a third step to this process. I’m not there yet, but I think I can see it taking shape. If I hadn’t started paying so much closer attention to light filtering through trees or bathing morning fog in an orange glow because of all this focus on watercolors, I’d have missed it, I think. This final quote that crystalizes what I’m seeing has popped up a number of times now, so I’m not sure who started it all. It’s a boneshaker though, that I’m still trying to coax into being my buddy:
“Don’t draw what you see, draw what you feel.”
Now that’s an entirely different way to interact with reference imagery, isn’t it! Snapping a picture in the moment during a hike or on the train freezes one of those haiku moments for you, sure. Cobbling together some stock images and a DAZ3d render or a photobash of some AI-generated elements can put together a good and unique composition, of course. And in that first step, you can practice your technique, reproducing it as faithfully as you can.
At some point though, Gi’s second step suggests you vary the angle, maybe reproduce it from above or from a different side…maybe with an armored zebra beside it, or a screaming werewolf. Mess around and don’t stress about perfection, right? It’s a sketchbook; what do you care if every other one turns out trash? Forms start repeating for you: the fact that eyes aren’t really ovals, that lips and noses and hair cast shadows, and that people almost never stand vertically straight on both feet. That sort of thing.
But then, when you’ve maybe gotten to a point where you can somewhat faithfully reproduce an image with variations and additions, with subractions, and perhaps even can summon something to the page entirely from memory and imagination, another step opens up for you.
Those are pictures I’ve taken in various spots this summer in Kansas City, Cades Cove in Tennessee, and at Destin, FL. You’ve probably got ones like it on your own phone, those images that caught your eye and made you feel something. A foggy morning, a quiet library with the sunlight streaming off a high window, a busy subway station or airport with interesting faces, or maybe a funny face your dog made. It made you feel something, so you snatched it to stick in your pocket.
That’s the third and ultimate step in art journeys, I think: to capture what you feel on the page. The reference becomes almost beside the point. I’m still working this out for myself. Maybe these musings prod something for you if visual arts are at all of interest to you.
Since some folks appreciated the first uploaded sketchbook, here is an update (paper sketches 1-3, watercolors from 4-13, Procreate digital art from 14-17):
Crazy busy year. I hope yours has gone well. For my part, I’m glad Christmas is on its way. That particular crazy freight train is more than welcome this year.
(Update Mar 2025)
And, in the spirit of accountability to improve, here’s an updated sketchbook of what I’ve been up to since this post went up (watercolors on pages 1-8, Procreate sketches pages 9-18, and physical sketchbook pages 19-24):
I’ve had a couple of weeks worth of a pause in a very hectic year so far and managed to dig back in to a novel in progress. This week, I had some mind-expanding epiphanies that set the whole novel on fire for me again: the exhilaration and thrill to see this story play out on paper burning with the same heat it did when they were all just ideas.
When they were all just ideas, that is, before words went to paper to ruin my dreams.
Thought I’d share that with you in case writer’s block or a blank canvas is staring back at you, or if the plot that made so much sense suddenly crumbled like burnt toast in your hands.
Mazewater: Master of Airships is a standalone story set in the Salt Mystic universe, existing at around 38k words of a planned 70-80k. The original notion was to introduce a new war marshal with the novel, which would lead the introduction of new playing cards in the Salt Mystic wargame for his faction. “Read the book, love the guy, go buy his cards.” Right?
But it grew to be a lot more than that. A whole world more!
Taking place in a wild, unruly city called the Jagganatheum, it’s the story of a sickly, asthmatic young dreamer from a doomed family and the abandoned sentient weapon he steals. When a wheezing, sickly giant is unleashed at the city’s heart, it reveals intrigues that carry him into adrenalin-fueled adventures in a shattered world and, ultimately, to the heights of legend.
Here, there are lore cards to learn more if you’re interested, all relating to elements that will appear in the novel:
Anyway, I pretty much stopped writing on this back in February. Yes, I was busy with my day job, but the plot I had in mind just kind of fell apart for me. It stopped making sense. I really got the impression back in the dead of winter that all the dazzling imagery I had in mind, those flashes of plot points that made the book worth writing for me, they were just getting strung together with a discount plot that would obviously stall and get contrived in places.
I’m the first guy to complain about poorly written soap opera nonsense like Star Wars: The Acolyte and Amazon’s Rings of Power. Juvenile and inept attempts at high school level drama frustrate me: having lead characters just go be heroes because that’s who they are, people being angry with each other just for the dialogue the writer wanted to include, or sizzle reels glued awkwardly together with coincidences or by having characters do things they just wouldn’t normally do but need to for the plot happen, for a few examples. I truly don’t want to be associated with anything that even smells like that.
No offense if you’re into either of these, but craftmanship in plotting is an aspiration of mine. These two mainstream offerings are stinkers in my opinion.
I read three things over the years that have been screaming at me recently (only one of which I can cite so I’ll paraphrase):
“The only thing worth writing about is people.” – Harlan Ellison
“Villains are interesting because they are often the driver of the plot – they DO things.” -unknown
“Marvel’s Magneto (major villain in the X-Men comics and movies) has one of the most interesting motivations in all of comics.” -unknown, but it was a writer for Wizard Magazine
What I take from all that is:
Stick to realistic motivations and interesting, fleshed-out people who all have their own agendas and desires (not just plot supporters who don’t exist when not in the chapter)
Have protagonists DRIVE the plot (versus villains) by their actions, which have consequences
Make the motivations of villains make sense and be understandable and relatable, almost justified
It’s these principles that set the wrecking ball to the ideas I was holding on to. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about:
1. A train trip through the wild, jumbled Jagganatheum
Right after I started writing the novel, I caught the flu – it was a nasty one with a fever that wouldn’t go away. One night I had one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. I had been trying to envision what a city two thousand years old and comprised of a single enormous building strapped to a mountainside would look like from the inside (and getting nowhere).
Then the dream – I saw Mazewater’s entire day play out. I watched him get beaten up by a guy who posed as his bully so his mom would stop trying to toughen him up. I saw him in a complex series of barter exchanges and understood how the social networks functioned. I remember being in a subway-style train station with ancient broken marble statues and skylights, hissing through massive corridors like airport concourses. It was a genius picture and made the city make so much more sense for me.
I was enamored with those images for months before I came to realize the whole series of exchanges and even the trip across the city just burned the clock and didn’t move anything. They could be trimmed without cost to the plot, and that hurt tremendously to let them go.
But I had to. And I knew it. Finally.
2. Ilianore, the loose cannon brunette
Oh, I hated to let this one go! No fever dream this time, but still she showed up in my head fully formed such that I could almost hear her voice. She had jet black hair she kept in a pony tail and worked part time for a troll-looking lady chef right out of a Studio Ghibli movie. When the lead character (who had crushed on her since they were in school together) would accidentially get her fired, Ilianore would barge into his apartment in a storm of anger, light a match and drop it to the floor, and sit to demand of him what was he thinking while his carpet burned. Just to make her point.
I found myself cramming in a romantic subplot with awkward flirting, weird secrets she would bring to the story, and a terrible confrontation after you were made to like her where she would die to drive him forward.
All nonsense and didn’t fit at all. It just wasn’t the story the core ideas needed. By keeping her, it forced certain things to happen with her or risk distractions and clutter. Unfortunately, and I breaks my heart to say this, we will not meet Ilianore in this book. We’ll likely never meet her, and I miss her already.
3. An old conspiracy uncovered
I turned this one loose just this past week. Still hurts.
Again, almost fully formed, I saw Mazewater on a stylite pillar doing a vision quest, trying to commune with the sentient weapon he’d stolen for 3 days in the rain. I knew why the pillar was there and what that had to do with the founding of the city. I knew what the weapon would say when it finally spoke, and how that would unlock an old conspiracy that turned the whole story on its head. I could have told you what that had to do with the giant’s attack on the city, what was really going on, and what happened next. I mean, this part of the story was core to the whole remainder of the novel. I really….can’t stress this enough….really didn’t see even the NEED to let this go.
So I was taking a long walk in the woods this past Tuesday, pleased that I had rewritten the work done so far into a tighter, coherent narrative with dynamic characters and that, so far, this story matched what was needed. However, some things about the bigger picture still didn’t make sense for me and felt cluttered. I was really worried heading out on that walk, fearing things might crumble again as I thought them through looking for holes. My plan was to let this walk take as long as it took to iron things out.
At one point, almost audibly, I told myself nothing was sacred. Nothing at all. What would the story look like if I just stopped holding on to cool pictures or imagined moments and let the motivations and personalities decide the course? What was it, exactly, that made me want to write this thing at all?
It turned out, the old conspiracy didn’t add anything useful at all. The weapon needs to say something else entirely. Even the vision quest was just a sizzle-reel for me that I thought was interesting, to add flavor to the history of the city but was useless in the end.
Gone! All of it. I am fascinated with where this wound up though. It’s tight and hangs together like brickwork.
Anyway, what I wanted to offer you today is the wisdom of outtakes. I have entire an entire chapter of Ilianore that I’m keeping for my own files. I’ve got pages of notes about the old conspiracy and what I saw in that fever dream of the city, that will likely never see the light of day – but which I’ll keep.
I’m not going to delete or discard any of that, much like directors struggle to cut scenes from their movies to which they’d become attached. In their case, they might add them to Director’s Cut versions of the movie just to feel good about sharing them with the world. Whether scenes wind up in the world or not though, it was the cutting that made the difference. That’s what tightened the story and made it resonate enough with an audience that anyone would even want a Director’s Cut of it in the first place.
Turn them loose, then. Nothing is sacred. Move on, even if they’re gorgeous.
I had writer’s block for a reason, and it was because I was holding on to nonsense that felt like gold.
Let me know what you think about that. Till next time,
When I was a teenager in Tennessee, I had this spot on a mountain bluff I would go to that overlooked the valley. It was a really beautiful place, at least to me. I’d string up a hammock and read or just hang out. One day after a short summer rain, I noticed some ants struggling to push a raindrop out of their little hill’s opening. For whatever reason, the drop wasn’t collapsing and stayed round and clear. And it’s crazy to think after this many decades gone by, I can still see that weird little moment that lasted less than a minute: a tiny little group of 7 or 8 ants pushing against a raindrop.
Stick with me a moment here. I have a suggestion for how to refresh your mind and open a new world of thoughts for you.
I recall another time in some random airport, I saw a young man, short and nervous, clutching his little sea satchel and looking at his dad. The dad was a rough-looking fellow, tattoos on his neck and arms, wrinkled and tanned skin. He had his hand on his son’s arm, giving him some kind of advice. I stole that moment and put it in the background of a novel I was writing it was so striking to me.
Just this week at the beach in Destin, Florida I saw a tiny little boy who I imagine had only just learned to walk, wearing his little white sun-hat and long-sleeved shirt with his tiny legs still bowed out leading the way for his grinning dad following. I’m so used to seeing parents pick little ones up and direct them, but this little guy turned to his dad, stuck an arm and finger awkwardly out forward, and pointed the way he was headed just before he determinedly took off. It was hilarious.
Here’s where I’m headed with this. Go get this book. It’s called Haiku Enlightenment, by Gabriel Rosenstock.
If you sometimes get a little weary of the same old streets, the same old buildings, and if politics or social media circuses are making the world seem just a mean place to you, then there’s a thing I try with myself that might help you too. In my day job as a consultant, I study and manipulate how people view themselves and their work. I’ve studied cult tactics and brainwashing. I’ve studied propaganda and manipulative tactics in media. I’ve worked professionally in change management and the creative process for over 25 years. In many ways, I’ve monetized studying how people think and applying what I’ve learned. What’s the big secret in all that?
Our brains are neuroplastic, meaning we can rewire how we think in a surprisingly short period of time with some effort and the right inputs.
Rosenstock’s book is beautiful, and a nice tool for you to use should it intrigue you – this thought of rewiring how you see the world. I imagine all Gabriel is trying to do with this book is make you see how beautiful haiku moments are and how to write some for yourself. I had no interest in writing poetry, but instead took this as a chance to adjust what information I was paying attention to in my surroundings (and more importantly, what I was NOT).
I’ve written about haiku here on Grailrunner before. Issa is my favorite now – dude went through some stuff and was still funny and poignant and timeless. Rosenstock’s book highlighted several poets that were new to me, which is great. I suggest if any of this resonates with you that you give a think to the sorts of things that are adding stress or negativity to your life and purposefully shoo them away as they pop up and make a very intentional effort to become a hunter of haiku moments – whether you intend to write them down in a poem being irrelevant.
What’s a haiku moment?
It’s a single, striking moment, often seen in nature or among people, where you realize something larger. It’s sometimes beautiful but doesn’t have to be. The point is it’s a tiny little story in an image, a whole vista of insight and wisdom in a single flash.
I promise you – these are everywhere in your life. Pick up Rosenstock’s book or something like it and absorb a little more about what makes for a haiku moment, then start hunting for them. Write them down, even if in prose. Keep a notebook of them so they’re pinned like butterflies for you to admire later.
If you see any cool ones, grab them and send them my way. I’m always interested in bursts of universal insight. You can sell that.
I lost over thirty years in my art journey because I (stupidly) took a wrong turn based on what should have been great advice. Let me tell you about that, how exactly I went off the rails, and what a ridiculously talented Korean artist said that got me back on the journey.
If you care about the process of visual creation, whether it’s you doing the creating or just a spectator’s interest in how all that works, then this one’s for you.
Why does this matter?
Crap, man, I’d like to be thirty years better in drawing and painting! I hate that I stepped away for that long. I’m the chief illustrator for Grailrunner, and its lead writer, and its game designer. I need to get a lot done myself to control costs, but somehow keep a high standard on quality of art to convey the unique (we think) property we’re trying to build with the Salt Mystic line.
The images below represent the style of work I’m building these days, relying heavily on photobashing and concept art techniques (with folks like Imad Awan as my virtual gurus). The Grailrunner house design standard is semi-realistic digital painting with grungy overlay, western themed adventurers almost always carrying the signature weapon (a gauntlet-based plasma weapon that doubles as a shield in duels), exploring statue-riddled, software-haunted ruins with shimmering dimensional portals. We aim for vibrant or earthy colors, lots of smoke and grit, with implied stories (often illustrating flash fiction on Salt Mystic lore cards).
See the lot of them (and trace my hopefully improving style) at the Artstation account. Yes, I use AI-generated bits to composite exactly like I do with stock images but generally composite everything into something new and paint over them such that the transformation is meaningful and my own.
It gets the job done, at least I think. Still, I wish they were grittier. I wish they broke more new ground than they do. I envy the striking shapes and designs of a lot of concept art out there for cinema and gaming – the kind of images that stick with you even if you don’t know the context. Artstation is great for inspiration, but it can also crush your dreams if you compare yourself to anybody.
What’s prompted this reminiscence about bad art advice?
Well, I came across this book called Sketching From The Imagination: Sci Fi by 3DTotal Publishing. I wrote about it here. That was October, which seems like an eternity ago. I posed for myself the challenge of returning to traditional pencil and ink drawing in a sketchbook to push my imagination harder than ever before. The dream is to explore a blank page with loose shapes and vague ideas to summon phantoms into form and create groundbreaking designs and concepts. Then these wild new beasties and tech and colorful characters would then find homes in the fiction or game settings.
How’s that going?
Meh. I was so much rustier than I thought I was. I’ll share some pages here to embarrass myself and stay accountable to you for improving. We’ll get to that. But let’s talk about that advice.
When I was a kid, I filled scores of sketchbooks and countless backs of trashed dot-matrix printer paper my dad had brought home from work. Drawings of super heroes and sci fi vehicles and cities were my jam. Comic books were my main source of imagery, so everything I was drawing had bold outlines and underwhelming composition. The stories weren’t being told by the images in a self-explanatory way – I didn’t think about that sort of thing. I was alone a lot, so I didn’t share these with anybody, nor did I get any feedback.
Flash forward to one day in art class, Middle School I guess, the teacher strolled by to see whatever I was working on and stopped to say something about my approach that resonated with me. He pointed at the paper and said something profound:
“Real world things don’t have outlines. Draw what you see.”
It shook me. Hadn’t thought about that. Good point. So I gave it everything I had to incorporate his advice into how I drew. Back home, hovering the pencil over the paper, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where or how to make a mark to start the drawing if you couldn’t outline it.
For this post, I looked through some old crates to find a particular drawing that would be humiliating to show but really staked the ground for when I began to turn away from drawing entirely. The picture in my head was a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure party with a lady wizard, a swordsman, and an elf planning their next move on a morning beach with foamy, ripply water lapping at their feet. Maybe a dying campfire in the foreground with smoke rising in front of them. I couldn’t find it, unfortunately.
Anyway, it was horrid. Everything on the page was so light, you couldn’t even make it out. I was petrified to start drawing outlines again, and I couldn’t see how to force shadows and contrast to draw out the shapes. It threw my perspective. It threw my focus on their faces. It ruined everything. It was the last sketchbook I really did anything with until decades later, at least in any serious way.
Sounds bad. What’s different now then?
I get it now. Youtube changes everything, doesn’t it? Contrasting light and dark, the subtle use of textures, faking details, focusing and directing the viewer’s eyes across the image, and strategic use of busy and rest areas…I never went to art school. That all may be common sense to you, but it’s a glorious rainmaker for me to see all that in action artist after artist, listening to these marvelous and generous people draw magnificent things and explain their thought process as they go. Great time to be alive, isn’t it?
I travel a lot, so I keep an art pack and sketchbook. Pigma FB, MB, and BB brush pens, Staedtler pigment liners, a mechanical pencil, and some Graphix watercolor felt pens. Since October, I’ve put the practice time in almost every night at least for a half hour. It wasn’t a pleasant return.
The dream is to draw from imagination though: new things. What I’ve learned from artist after artist in their podcasts, Youtube or ImagineFX interviews is that drawing from reference is far more common. A lot of the guys you see on video drawing or painting have their reference images off screen.
Reference images! That wasn’t why I got into this gig. If I wanted a copy of an image, I’d take a picture. It was disheartening to me to hear professionals talk about light table tracing for their outlines…to see fantasy illustrators mash up references to form fantasy beasts – all of it copying what they saw. That was my problem back in the first place, right?
Then I came across this genius: Kim Jung Gi. Rest in peace.
Please google him if this flame of wonder is unfamilar to you. He drew from his imagination like a magical fountain spews sparkly fairies. He just walked up to paper and went nuts, drawing fish-eyed perspective, highly intricate intertwined figures, scores of objects and novel, distinct, and interesting characters at a high rate of speed and without slowing. How’d he do that?
That guy didn’t have any reference images. That’s what I wanted. I had to go deep to understand what he did right that I was doing wrong that could unlock this magic. Exploration on the blank page…finding ideas haphazardly that were uniquely my own…I wanted to bottle this magic for myself. How in the world did he get to the point he could do it so wonderfully. Then I heard him say it (through a translator):
“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”
His point was you have to do the reference images and understand forms and shapes in three dimensional space before you can do what he did. He explained the lifetime of sitting in public places filling thousands of pages drawing what he saw and forcing himself to draw it from another angle. That was the key – he drew what he saw with a lifetime of practice, but still practiced summoning those images from his memory to try them from different angles.
He drew what he HAD seen. It was a big realization for me, this idea of examining the reference image – not just to get better at copying it, but to run your mind’s eye all over it in three dimensions to understand it better and to file that away to fuel your imagination.
Now THAT’s what artists actually do. They don’t copy. They understand.
I wish that guy was still alive. He was amazing.
Agreed. Now how about sharing your progress?
Ugh. Here you go. Don’t be judgey. Wish me luck that things improve. Go ahead. Click the book.
Ouch. I hope you don’t lose all trust in me, should you have had any. Photobashing is an entirely different beast than battling blank pages with a mechanical pencil. I’ll keep at it. The beast-shaped robotic vehicle in the header image was a minor victory in this experiment: called a “sporecutter”, it’s the first concept that’s come from the new approach that might actually make it to the fiction. Page 15 in the sketchbook file here is the front runner for the design of an important vehicle in the Mazewater: Master of Airships novel I’m working on. That’s another possible win.
That’s what I wanted to talk to you about today. I hope it was enlightening or helpful, should this be a journey you find compelling for yourself. Otherwise, I hope I still brightened your day a bit and made you think.
For some roleplaying gamers, the thrill of the game comes from cautious, dangerous exploration of the unknown with a hissing, hungry beast potentially down every corridor. For some, it’s the “beer and pizza” comradery and casino-like feel of the dice deciding life and death. Many love the unfolding stories, to gather “there I was” anecdotes like they’re candy.
But some of us want some blood and consequences.
Youtube is crammed with advice on how to make your tabletop RPG combat more realistic, but there’s a fellow you’re going to meet here who may have cracked that code with a rocketship of a game from the turn of the millennium called The Riddle of Steel.
So you should know…Jake studied and taught at a leading historical martial arts organization, was co-founder of the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance, and held championship and rank positions in multiple disciplines including the number one position in the United States for the longsword. He’s not just some nerd cranking out dice mechanics, though when we spoke, he shocked me with his depth of RPG knowledge and passion. He’d even heard of Feng Shui Action Movie Roleplaying, which that alone would have made him awesome.
Here he is. Watch this and try not to grin at this guy.
Anyway, today he might be head of the European cybersecurity business for a global consulting firm and a Ted Talk waiting to happen, but why brag about that when you created something many consider as the most realistic simulation of combat in a tabletop game? I sat down with Jake in December to talk about everything from The Witcher to D&D, from the reality of trying to stab someone with a sword to being front-row at some legendary developments in roleplaying games. Our chat was a fascinating tornado of influences and inspirations, and, sadly, I can only present here the heaviest-hitting topics and exchanges to keep the size manageable (puns intended). I hope you enjoy hearing from him as much as I enjoyed our conversation.
As always, my main interest in hearing from Jake was to understand his inspirations and influences, what drove him to create something in the first place and from what wells he may have drawn as he did so. Before we get into any of that or in any details here, let me hook you a bit on what innovations and experimentation made Riddle of Steel unique.
Riddle of Steel Overview
The game itself (Driftwood Publishing 2001) is a D10 dice pool system, meaning you’re trying to accumulate as many 10-sided dice as you can for various rolls to see whether you get the outcome you want as the story plays out. The setting is a massive continent on a roughly earth-sized world (both named Weyrth) and replicates many familar low fantasy sword & sorcery elements. – though with plenty of room for vicious, deadly combat. And that’s where the system really shines.
Spiritual Attributes: Like many systems, characters receive stats based on their backstory and natures to affect dice rolls. Here, these include Strength, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, and Health as well as Will Power, Wit, Mental Aptitude, Social, and Perception. However, this ruleset also provides for Spiritual Attributes such as Conscience, Destiny, Drive, Faith, Luck and Passion: traits derived from your character’s backstory and which can change over the course of the game. They have mechanical consequences for gameplay but also have a magical way of driving roleplaying and heightening dramatic moments.
Combat Initiative: Commonly, the turn order of combat moves in a roleplaying game is determined by an Initiative dice roll. In Riddle of Steel, opposing players (or the game master rolling for a non-player character) declare a fighting stance up front which can provide stronger attacks and defenses at the cost of predictability and flexibility. Players then simultaneously uncover either a RED or a WHITE die to either ATTACK or WAIT. Imagine two boxers eyeing each other amid their footwork to gauge the next move and size up their options.
Terrain: The ruleset encourages description of and integration with the environment in which the combat is taking place. In fact, page 77 offers Target Numbers to roll against so that things like swampy ground or tight spaces affect gameplay. To me, this opens up all kinds of interesting twists in a fight given the props and surrounding conditions either fighter might take advantage of.
Hit Location Zones: When you make your attack, it isn’t blindly at the opponent so much as an attempt to strike a specific target. It’s part of the attack. Looks like this:
Detailed Damage Tables: I understand this is one of the areas for which the Riddle of Steel ruleset was often criticized as being too clunky and slowing down the game. My take is a bit different though. There are tables here for Cutting, Puncture, and Bludgeoning damage for each Hit Location Zone. Just have them handy and printed separately, man. Doesn’t take long to find what happened And it brings a gruesome and fierce edge to the fight. Honestly, combat doesn’t take longer than a turn or two in this game anyway.
That’s right. You can die in combat in Riddle of Steel. Fast.
Let’s Hear From The Designer!
Jake, What were some of your earliest influences and inspirations? [The actual conversation has been paraphrased and edited for flow and space considerations.]
“I started with D&DSecond Edition, kind of a blend of 2nd and 1st Edition because I came in on the cusp between the two. At some point, I also played Shadowrun, and played a pretty healthy amount of Warhammer Fantasy roleplay, which was my favorite of the lot. And fictional inspirations too. I’d read some great novel that I wanted to play in a game. I would look at which of the games that I played would be easiest to hack or home brew.
“I bought a D30 once in a game store as a novelty. What the hell do you use that for, right? So Marvel Studios back in the early 90’s in the heyday of Jim Lee and the New X-men rebranding, they published these cards. You know, collector cards of all the Marvel X-men superheroes with stats on the back. So I used my D30 and those stats to write my first ever coherent roleplaying game. I don’t know. I was, maybe 12 or 13. Then at one point in high school, the whole World of Darkness thing got really huge. So I played some Vampire, some Werewolf, and some of those other spinoff games. And GURPS, this idea of modularity and all that. These were all heavy, heavy points of inspiration for me.”
And The Witcher books?
“Right. I spent a couple of years living and working in Poland and learned to speak Polish. I started reading them before the last one was published. I read Sapkowski’s works while I was in Poland, in Polish, and I was just so energized by them! I thought they just captured my imagination in a huge way! When I got back to the U.S. in late 1999, early 2000, I wanted to play The Witcher. I wanted to do something that had this vibe of really cool combat, right? I wanted to do something where the players are making choices about what the character is doing in the fight. I didn’t want to just say ‘you roll, you hit, you roll, you don’t hit, I attack’ – you know. I wanted some degree of tangible, tactical interaction.
“And around that same time, I was introduced to King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford, which is a master class in game design. One of the greatest games ever designed, hard stop. Just phenomenal.
“Fun little side note on that: shortly before Greg died, a common friend of ours introduced us. I consulted on some of the combat rules for what Greg was planning for 6th edition. I signed an NDA – all that stuff, actually sat down with them at Gen Con. I walked him through a whole bunch of armor research…how it really functions and how it’s really fought in. All these things and then…God save us all…he died. I have no idea if any of that made it into the notes for the guy who actually finished 6th edition. My guess is it didn’t, which just kills me because Pendragon is such an incredible game. To have had my name listed as advisor for Pendragon would have been like a crowning nerd achievement. Anyway, Pendragon. Phenomenal!”
Any others?
“Yeah, I was introduced to a Polish game called Dzikie Pola, which means The Wild Fields. It’s the Polish name for eastern Poland, the Ukraine, during the kind of Baroque period – the Polish golden age when it was sabers and Sarmatians and big furry hats. It’s an amazing period, and there is some amazing fiction and historical stuff out there about it! Anyway, it had this really clever dueling system for sabers, and it was the first time I’d seen this kind of approach where you have a number of combat points – like you’ve got 10, the other guy, 8 or whatever. You pick from a list of maneuvers that cost points. Then you contest back and forth. The game’s second edition took all that stuff out though. I don’t know how functional it all was, but the idea was brilliant!
And John Wick was starting to publish his big games: 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings. John Wick was kind of the rock star of game designers. He’d won the Origins Award for best game two or three years in a row. I was reading some of his games and looking at his tech, the vibe there. But I tried hacking GURPS. I tried hacking Warhammer Fantasy. I just ultimately decided that I couldn’t hack any of these games to be what I wanted.”
So we’re getting into game design choices for Riddle of Steel, then?
“Yeah. I know from playing Shadowrun that it was fun to roll a handful of dice, right? I knew from playing World of Darkness that I hated when you rolled and hit, then rolled for damage and didn’t do anything. I hated that these things needed to be connected. There was no point in even trying to hack D&D at that point. They’d gone to edition 3.5 and I was like, ‘what are feats’? I definitely went through at least a decade, maybe 15 years, when I was “too cool” for D&D. So I started looking at it as a blank slate with some requirements: I needed you to make combat choices all the time you’re in a fight, choices that had to be meaningful. They have to be impactful and interesting enough that the rest of the table wants to watch.
“There were just things happening in these other games that I was playing that were taking me out of the fiction. There had to be a sense of risk, a sense of danger to promote making certain kinds of decisions. I wanted something exciting to watch, with real decisions that had enough flexibility so you could insert some flash into it. I kind of failed at that, to be honest, but it was a major goal in the game design then.”
Flash. Tell me about that.
“I wanted a system where you could create the kind of things that show up in the Witcher books. Geralt fights in a very flashy way. The word ‘pirouette’ shows up a lot, at least in the Polish. He cut a guy in a pirouette: a somersault and a pirouette. And the guy’s head popped off. I wanted a system where you could plug that kind of stuff in.
I started doing research and realized I needed to know more…not just about games. And I started looking at how weapons were used historically and stumbled across what would later be called the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) movement. It blew my face off! It honestly replaced roleplaying games as the primary obsession of my life for the next 20 years. As I researched, I realized how little we knew as a community about the martial arts of the period. Everything I found out, everything I could glean and pull from that made its way into Riddle of Steel. So I stopped worrying about some of the more cinematic, flashy stuff and started thinking about what happened historically…how do I model that in my game? I got an endorsement from a leading historical martial arts organization at the time because I showed them what I was doing. And listen, man, if you’re trying to recreate a historical martial art, you’re a nerd.”
Let’s talk about the art in the book.
“Yeah. The main three artists in the book are myself, a guy named Rick McCann (who also helped design the original sorcery system), and Ben Moore. My high school buddies, right? I was in the art scene, and they were my artist friends. Rick was by far the more professional artist of us. I think he’s a professional artist today.” [Editor’s note – Rick has in fact taught artists at Dreamworks Animation among other places and is indeed available for contracted art]
I’ve got to ask about this one particular image in there. This guy.
“Yeah. That’s Rick. Rick McCann. Rick was really, really good. Rick did the cover.”
“All the knotwork was done by Ben Moore. All the very clean black and white inked pieces were me, and some of the pencil pieces. And one of the criticisms I got early on like when we first went to GAMA Expo was there was too much art, that I should have used less art and avoided a lot of the lower quality pieces. I guess that’s true. I don’t know. It’s worth pointing out: I just wanted a game for me and my friends to play. I had no intention of publishing. And then I wanted a physical copy because, you know, pdf’s weren’t a thing yet. To get something affordable, I had to print hundreds of copies and so – well crap – if I’m going to print hundreds of copies, I’ve got to sell 299 of them. And so it spiraled like that.”
Fantastic. Just fantastic. Talk about those early days then, as you guys were putting this together.
“I was going to university. Rick and Ben were in art school. I wrote the entire first draft of everything and showed it to these guys. They had some ideas and added to it, then the first large-scale play test of the game was with my old high school D&D group. I went back to visit them. One of the guys in the group – his grandparents ran a doughnut shop. We’d go there in the afternoons after it closed, and we played a whole five-session campaign over a summer week. I was trying to see if my ideas were even going to work at all.
“You look for trends and patterns, what seems to be working. And I went back and designed again. Then the version we originally published, 300 copies, that’s the one we took to the GAMA trade show and to Origins. And when that sold out, we needed another printing, and I found a printer in China or wherever that was affordable, with higher quality print and clearer images.
“It was interesting. Going from the fun part of designing the game and creating this work of art, building it in Pagemaker, putting in the text, picking fonts and graphics, play testing, publishing at the first couple of cons where you’re promoting the game…and there’s so much excitement and energy till you realize you’ve now borrowed more money than you’ve ever had in your life. You’re trying to make this happen, and suddenly it’s a business you’re trying to make money with. And the fun of using it for tax writeoffs becomes not so much fun anymore.”
And you wound up selling it?
“Yes, I sold Driftwood Publishing in 2004, and the rights went to someone else, who then sold it in 2013 to Tavish Campbell of Red Lion Publishing. I haven’t been in contact with Tavish in a decade, and I wonder if he’s not dead!” [Editor’s note: we tried contacting Tavish for this article. We really did. If any of you can help reach him, Jake would like to catch up!]
“But I learned a lot as a designer. As I write a successor game, whatever it winds up being called, I’ve got great stuff. In the event that I ever get around to finishing and publishing it, I understand my priorities as a designer so much better now because I have words that describe things that I simply felt as a 22 year old.”
You said European Martial Arts blew your face off. Give me one concrete example of what you meant by that.
“I think the first thing was – I saw this video of a guy doing what we call a flourish, just swinging the sword around shadow-boxing with an early rapier, something you could cut with. The blade was moving so fast, and it was so lethal-looking. The economy of movement! Up until that point, every time I’d seen somebody wielding a sword, it was an actor performing staged choreography that came from either modern sport fencing or from traditional stage combat (which is meant to be inefficient and safe by design). If you look at the sword fighting even in some of the better films like Lord of the Rings, you can see they’re intentionally swinging at each other’s swords and not at each other. So I saw this guy who was not a stage fencer, moving his weapon in a way that was like – Oh my God, this is fast! It looks lethal. It looks beautiful.
“And the second thing that blew my face off was realizing there are hundreds of books written during that time period that tell you how to use these instruments. The whole HEMA movement was about taking a martial artist and a historical book and slamming these things together. We were actually experimenting to recreate lost arts by taking people who knew how to move and getting them to try and interpret these historical sources and make that come to life.”
If somebody’s reading this and wants to get their hands on a book like that, name a good one.
“There’s a website called The Wiktenauer that contains dozens if not hundreds of these manuscripts. Translated photocopies. All kinds of stuff. My stupid claim to fame is that I named it. I had nothing else to do with its creation. It’s a play on wiki and then the master, Johannes Lichtenauer.”
How does The Burning Wheel RPG fit into all this?
“Luke Crane and I became friends actually. The Burning Wheel and Riddle of Steel approached the same problems in different ways. We had very similar design priorities, and so when we first met each other in 2002 or 2003, we were definitely looking at each other crazy, like, whoa – hold on, are you like a competitor? Are you an enemy? And a year later we were very close friends, and he is still one of my closest friends to this day. I spent many years going to Gen Con as a member of Burning Wheel HQ crew, just quietly being this guy who also wrote this other game.”
All right. It’s time. Let’s have some advice from the designer of Riddle of Steel on how to fight in the game. What do I need to know?
“Dump as many stats as you can to get a high reflex score. The higher the combat pool, the better. The name of the game is not to land a hit; it’s to drain the other guy’s pool and then land a hit. Once you land a hit, press your advantage. But focus on not getting hit first. Pressing and gaining the initiative. If you gain the initiative, keep it. If you throw a WHITE die and your opponent throws a RED, and he comes at you with a small number of dice, parry with slightly more than he did. If you parry with too much, he’ll use the feint.
“The odds are in your favor if he attacks with a lot of dice. Use the counter maneuver when you attack. If you think you’ve got a chance to go for the jugular, go high and throw a lot of dice into it. But if you think he’s going to counter that, you’ll get killed. So get to know your opponent. If he uses a lot more defense dice, then call a feint.”
Jake, you’ve been amazing! Thanks for your time here.
“Yeah, by all means! As you can see, I’m happy to talk about all this stuff. I still enjoy it. Thanks for spending time to hear me rant.”
*
For Grailrunner readers, it may be expensive or at times impossible to find a copy of Riddle of Steel out there in the wild right now. Here’s a link to a Quick Start Guide from Driftwood Publishing by Stephen Barringer that’s publicly available for free.
Hopefully you enjoyed our chat. For me, it was an absolute blast! I’ll leave you with the opening words from Riddle of Steel:
Since the dawning of time, when Triumph the Forger-God pounded out the world from the mists and ores of heaven, mean have sought the Riddle of Steel.
Few have found it.
What is it?
It is invincibility – to strike with all and to be struck by none.
It is understanding – to ask questions and to know the answers.
It is peace – to walk without fear, to know that the end is in your own hands.
It is skill – to feel the elegance found in violence, and to know the beauty found in stillness.
It is Spirit – to gaze into the face of your God and to know him before he comes for you.
Grailrunner Publishing 