A Celebration! We’ve Hit The Halfway Mark!

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Oh boy, has this been harder and infinitely more rewarding than I’d thought it would be!

A few months ago, we announced an exciting new project we’re working on at Grailrunner, expanding our Salt Mystic setting into tabletop roleplaying through a bibliomancy-style oracles book. The core idea is to provide a simple engine for exploring a fully realized science fantasy world with its rich history, colorful people and cultures, and the quirks and dangers of exploration contained in the covers of a book. The innovative twist on standard roleplaying oracles, which typically take the form of dice tables, is it will be constructed in a bibliomancy format.

We’re calling it:

I’m the guy writing it and it’s been life-changing. Seriously. I’ve had to stretch my imagination till it hurts to build out a realistic but fantastical world interesting enough to merit exploring and complex enough to come to glorious life for a solo player as well as for groups with a game master…all while avoiding contradictions with stories and materials we’ve already published.

What is bibliomancy?

It means foretelling the future by interpreting a random passage from a book.

How does that relate to roleplaying games?

In well-constructed roleplaying games like Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn or Starforged, there are layers of dice tables you consult to surprise and throw new encounters and situations at a player. Shawn is a master of this, providing a first impression of a person, then a name, then a more revealed aspect of their character as you get to know them. In Starforged, he provides similar layering for a star system, a planet seen from orbit, then more revealed aspects of settlements as you land your space ship and learn more. This randomness and immersion makes magic happen when you’re trying to avoid a blank page staring back at you (if you’re playing solo) or, worse, a table of players waiting on you to be creative.

More to my point today, he also provides “Action” and “Theme” tables intended to set the scene for a new area you’re exploring or some new situation your player is entering. They’re a bit vague but Shawn has described the marvelous imaginative process we follow in consulting tables like this as “creative interpretation”. What he means is you bring your own thoughts and ideas and filters to bear when you roll for these random descriptive words and make sense of them to drive the story forward.

Apologies if you see the I Ching as reflecting a deep reality but I do not and view the creative interpretation process as similarly at work figuring out what a hexagram has to do with a given situation.

So this new book will be a one-stop shop for a roleplaying adventure then?

Yes. I’m being careful to design for use with any roleplaying system (as people are a bit judgey about this) so it can just be an oracles supplement for other systems. However, there are some intriguing things you can only do with bibliomancy mechanics which make it necessary to provide very streamlined rules a solo player or game master can use without any other system (or even dice) at all!

What sorts of new things in the Salt Mystic setting will we see in this?

Wow, it surprises me every week! In another project (called Ruinwalker), we already had designed these massive naturally armored rhinos called “towerbeasts”, bio-engineered for ancient wars but still lingering about. Here, as towerbeasts pop up in various places it struck me that they didn’t have the kind of personality dragons do, jealously guarding piles of treasure and breathing white-hot flames.

So…

In Salt Mystic, we have all these abandoned gates to pocket dimensions of artificial space, inside which can be all manner of wonders. Suddenly, towerbeasts got taller in my imagination, and curious, fond of idly poking at and lingering about these gates. They might even jealously protect them, creating ugly encounters for adventurers looking to take a peek inside.

And I had them hiss lightning too, just to make it more interesting.

Fantastic! What else?

Oh, it’s something cool every week or so. My background imagination is always running on this. Let’s leave it for now.

OK, what is the creative process for this? What are your influences?

I wanted this to be on an epic scale, with shimmering cities in the distance and a long, rich history that gets glimpsed but maybe not exhaustively explained, giving the feeling of a world that’s existed a very long time and in which terribly and mighty things have happened. I’ve been rotating at random through several classic epics and transforming a randomly selected phrase into something that makes sense in this setting.

These, so far:

  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey
  • The Ramayana
  • The Mahabharata
  • Greek mythology
  • Metamorphoses
  • Lucian’s True History
  • Calvino’s Invisible Cities
  • Dante’s Inferno
  • La Morte D’Arthur
  • The Aeneid
  • Beowulf
  • Gilgamesh
  • The Kalevela
  • Lugulbanda
  • Louis L’Amour books
  • The Persian Book of Kings
  • Arabian Nights
  • Parzival
  • Ring of the Nibelung
  • The Raghuvamsa
  • The Song of Roland
  • Pigafetta’s diary
  • The Lives of Saints

For example, if a phrase or encounter from a King Arthur story has a betrayal and a virtuous knight, I’ll keep the betrayal and turn the knight into a famous carbine gunslinger. Magical objects become abandoned & mysterious machines.

I’ve also recently started flipping to random pages in ImagineFX magazines and to interesting images on Artstation for inspiration.

What about the game mechanics?

I’ve spent a lot of time researching the best mechanics of various games to translate into a bibliomancy implementation. For exploration, there isn’t a game system better than Free League Publishing’s Forbidden Lands. I’ve taken a spark from them and eliminated dice and the map but tried to keep the general feel of how they treat encounters, story fragments, inventories, and experiences while exploring.

Right now, I’m trying to crack the code on a combat mechanic that doesn’t involve clueless bashing and smashing to grind down hit points. I’m super intrigued by an old, out-of-print game called Riddle of Steel, which contains an innovative and brutal set of rules for realistic combat simulation.

I’ve recently gotten touch with the designer of the game, a fantastic guy named Jake Norwood. We’ll be chatting later this month (I’ll write up the interview for our Inspirational Creator series). Hopefully, I can streamline from the spark of what he has there into something easy but with similar tactics and feel that leverages my format.

Anyway, I just wanted to celebrate a bit and catch everyone up on what’s happening here. I’m targeting 60k words for the text of this, a middling sized novel word count. When I crossed 30k words this week, I felt like cheering. It’s fun, but a real stretch.

I hope this intrigues you, and that you’re okay getting the occasional update as things evolve. Till next time,

New Salt Mystic Lore Card Available For Free Now!

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It’s always exciting when we can bring you another lore card: those new bits of the expanding Salt Mystic setting delivered in a unique fusion of flash fiction and original artwork! And they’re free!

You can download any or all of the Lore Cards at the Story Arcade by smashing the button below:

One thing we’re hammering home with the Salt Mystic line, and which will always remain core to it, is this:

In the Salt Mystic universe, cowboy-clad adventurers with ball lightning carbines slung to their arms bravely delve terrifying and thrilling pocket dimensions. The backstory of the Infinite Republic and its collapse, and the unlimited range of possibilities lying in wait out there behind sparkling dimensional gates is the (intentional) engine behind the adventures we’re trying to create.

Read all about the setting here.

So this lore card, called “Newb”, began with the image. I was touring an art museum in Kansas City. And I came across Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “Coastal Harbor with a Pyramid: Evening”, an oil on canvas from 1751.

Here, let me zoom in to the part that struck me:

I just kind of stopped and stared at that part. I mean, what was a pyramid with Roman columns doing on a seashore? And a functional one, at that? It sent my mind reeling, and of course ultimately (as always with me), made me think of sparkling and sizzling gates to artificial pocket dimensions where boundless adventures awaited.

Doesn’t that happen to you?

The artwork for this lore card was based on this, then. I wanted ruins beside a seashore with dudes working their gear along the lines of an exploration party, and I imagined the oriel gate as a shimmering window to another world up on the ruins.

The piece that heads this article is the end result: a paintbash of numerous elements, some of which were drawn from an AI art generator using prompts relating to what I had in mind. Once I composited all the pieces and bits together in Photoshop and color graded everything to match, I tried another trick.

Take a look at this work by Milan concept artist, Edvige Faini:

I am not great with color palettes. In Photoshop, you can match an image to another image’s color palette fairly readily. What I had produced so far in my process was too brown, too plain. It didn’t stand out like I’d hoped, and my adjustments to color and vibrance and hue weren’t giving me the result I wanted.

So I used Edvige’s piece here for the color scheme, matching my art to her color palette. I don’t know what you think, but to me, it’s wonderful. I’m a little overly attached to turquoise, so I’m biased. But still, I like the final product quite a bit.

This was the first lore card where I added the text over the image magazine-style. I’ve been reading a lot of graphic design books so wanted to experiment a bit.

Download the new lore card here.

Till next time, guys:

I Read A Book Because Of Its Cover, So Let Me Tell You How That Went

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John Berkey was an earth-shattering genius painter of science fiction images. I love everything I’ve ever seen from him. And it isn’t stretching the truth to say that if you view space ships as sleek, aerodynamic vehicles with white plating, that can be traced in many ways right back to him.

Seriously.

He did these, for example:

My first introduction to him way back in the day was this masterwork below, which inspired the mile-high vortex cruiser hydrofoils in the Salt Mystic universe. Just look at this beast:

And, of course, he did this one too, which some of you may remember:

So why am I on again about John Berkey? Well, more than once I’ve seen this haunting, fascinating book cover drift across my social media feed or appear on a used bookstore shelf:

I’d never heard of Edmund Cooper, and it didn’t have space ships or a hook in the back cover text that sealed the deal, so I passed it by multiple times. I’m not that much into humanity turning away from machines because of some uprising or difficulties, like Dune’s Butlerian Jihad or Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz. I didn’t really care who the “third men” were, or to read what I imagined would be monotonous pages with religious torch-bearing zealots yammering on in mobs to some plucky machine-builder about how evil computers could be or whatever.

Apologies if that’s your thing, I’m just a bit worn out on those tropes and don’t find them interesting. So I moved on.

But that image though.

What in the world was the deal with that crazy face emblazoned on the balloon?! I love a naval battle too. Maybe, I thought, after considering Berkey’s fascinating cover art so many times, I should read this book just to settle some questions about what he was painting.

And I’ll cut to the bottom line for you: The Cloud Walker is an easy read, with some mild, pleasant twists on the story you expect to play out here based on the cover description:

The setting is mostly the small town of Arundel in what had once been the county of West Sussex in England after two world wars have decimated the population and turned society against technology in all its forms. The protagonist, Kieron, dreams of building a flying machine, even though he knows what the Luddite priests can do to him if he’s caught. There’s an interesting love triangle, with some mild surprises in how that turns out, and a massive shift in the plot at one point – relating to a pirate invasion, and which ultimately leads to the battle portrayed in Berkey’s marvelous image.

I imagine if you’re a regular reader, you can knock this one out in a couple of days. It was a great experience for me, primarily for one key reason which honestly inspired me to write this article in the first place:

Cooper’s writing style.

C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles Of Narnia
L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series

There is a style of storytelling often used in fables and myths that is charming, easily relatable, and that focuses on things common to us all like family, fear of the unknown, betrayal, and friendship. Read any of the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis or the Oz books by L. Frank Baum and enjoy a master class in what I’m talking about here. It’s in the word choice, the easy manner of painting images with words, and the awe and wonder of fantastic beasts and places like you’re sitting by a fire listening to it. Lewis and Baum knew what they were doing.

Cooper isn’t in their league; it just struck me that I was several chapters in before I knew it and sinking wonderfully deeper into his rural landscape, getting to know Kieron and his family, the two ladies, and just why he wanted to take to the air in the first place.

I won’t spoil anything here, but I feel Cooper stuck the landing on the ending (pun intended, you’re welcome).

Anyway, I liked it so much I tried another one by Cooper, called The Overman Culture.

Honestly, I hated it. It was the same narrative style, just a meandering and plain mystery box story with some juvenile personal interactions and nowhere near enough happening to keep your interest. I doubt I’ll try Cooper again, though The Cloud Walker will remain with me.

Pick it up sometime if you get the chance. It feels like a comforting fable, and maybe we need more stories like that.

Till next time,

Riffing Ideas Like Stan Lee: The Marvel Method With AI

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Assuming there is an afterlife, and that I get to hug three people of my choosing for just how wonderful they were and how much they impacted me, I’m thinking (today at least, the list changes):

  1. Robin Williams
  2. Pausanius (explained here)
  3. Stan Lee

Honorable mention to Nicholas of Myra since he was Santa Claus.

Let’s talk about Stan Lee for a minute, and the miraculous collaborative technique he popularized, in many ways pioneered in comics writing called “The Marvel Method”.

Listen to him explain it here.

The stories Stan used to tell of the old days of Marvel are truly fascinating and inspiring. His mom got him the job with a cousin (it was Timely Comics then). Pretty much all the adults quit or didn’t care and were never around the office, leaving him as a teenager who knew nothing about the business pretending everything was fine.

All manner of folks apparently went on business as usual with the in’s and out’s of the office, never really knowing the kid that was always in was the one basically running everything. As he matured in the business, and couldn’t keep up with the many writing responsibilities, he relied on what came to be called “The Marvel Method”, meaning he would provide an outline or maybe just an idea to the artists, and they would go nuts from there, expanding the basic plot thread into intricate panels of story without words.

Stan would take what they sent, whatever they sent, and add the dialogue and narration, riffing off what they had provided since he only knew the basics of the story. With geniuses like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby to work with, he made magic.

Here’s what you might have seen, for example, sent in by John Buscema:

We’ve stated our position on generative AI tools here at Grailrunner before. Bottom line, although many occupations are threatened by this rapidly evolving technology, it isn’t going away. In fact, it’s a new industrial revolution. We believe tools like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT have a place in the world, but see them more like stock image websites or reference or idea books.

Like George Lucas did back in the day with Ralph McQuarrie’s mind-expanding images, the art and the ideas can dance together and make beautiful new worlds.

What’s that got to do with Stan Lee?

There’s a new experimental generative AI program called AI Comic Factory hosted on huggingface here. Looks like this:

You select the style and layout, then enter a prompt. When you hit the Generate button, it lays out a set of comic panels based on your choices and entry that are impressive.

While I have no intention of packaging these up for our Salt Mystic line, it really is fun to describe some of the elements of our IP and see what looks like a Humanoids comic illustrated by Phil Gemenez pop up in a few seconds with interesting graphic elements that inspire more ideas to pursue.

Look at these to see what I mean. My prompts were variations of cowboys entering dimensional portals, stone golems (glowing or otherwise), beautiful fantasy cities and majestic airships, that sort of thing. All very much in line with Salt Mystic adventuring.

I’m drooling at this. It’s incredible how inspiring this can be! When I’m looking for descriptions for a character now, or costumes (which I hate describing), or an interesting perspective for a city, I can go back to these and dream.

Recently, I started playing with Actions in Photoshop to turn images to pen & ink drawings with the click of a button. I have a very nice gallery of ball lightning carbines now to drop in to whatever I’m working on. For the header image, I grabbed one of those, color matched and graded it after compositing it in. I cut it off to fit the panel so it would look like it belonged.

Then I grabbed a cartoon dialogue bubble from a Google search and used Comic Sans font in Photoshop to add the gunslinger’s words. Not sure what he’s pissed about, or who in that city is going to pay for it, but it sends my mind reeling.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to suggest to you today. If you’re going to try it out, don’t forget to be respectful of the artists who worked on the images that trained tools like these, but don’t be afraid to collaboratively build something new with them either.

Let us know what you think.

Till next time,

New Salt Mystic Lore Card Available For Free Now: “Chimera”

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One of the most exciting things we do around here at Grailrunner is introduce new bits of the lore of our Salt Mystic setting in the form of Lore Cards. A fusion of art and short fiction, it’s an important mechanism for us to introduce and test these mini-expansions of concepts that will wind up ultimately as game cards or in the books or stories.

You can download any or all of the Lore Cards here at the Story Arcade.

A product we have heavily active in development right now is a bibliomancy-based oracle book for roleplaying in the Salt Mystic universe to be called The Augur’s Book Of Lots.

In order to bring that to life, all manner of new encounter types, new places, and historical figures and their stories are needed. It’s an incredible, life-changing experience for me personally to explore all that and watch it unfold like a big, crazy flower, and I can’t wait for you to see it. Seriously, this whole world is building itself and waiting for you to slide a ball lightning carbine on your arm and take a cautious step through the gates…

Today, we thought we’d introduce you to a new exciting, and sometimes terrifying, addition to the world of the Salt Mystic: the chimera.

The sneaky fellow leaping on our hapless narrator today is part man / part scorpion. In the oracle book so far, we’ve met countless hybrids like this already, though this particular combination freaks me out the most.

Download the new card here

As for the art, as always it’s a paintbash with the heavy lifting done in Photoshop. In this case, the bounty hunter, the skull on his hat, the backdrop, and the scorpion-man were all drawn from various iterations of Stable Diffusion or Wonder, with heavy correction and repair. I discovered the ‘puppet warp’ in Photoshop, which is my new favorite trick!

After compositing them together and color grading everything, I added some Stock nebulosity overlays from Nucly to make the diffuse smoke around the windows, blending them in Screen mode. The positioning of the scorpion-man was tricky – it made more sense for him to be creeping around behind our clueless bounty hunter, but the more I looked at him in mid-air, the creepier and more interesting I found it to be.

I wanted the skull on the bounty hunter’s hat to glow, so that along with the window glow was just some soft brush painting in Color Dodge blend mode.

Anyway, we hope you like the final product. Let us know what you think, and please check back periodically for updates on the stuff we’ve got cooking.

Till next time,

Aesthetic Puzzles: When Bach Met Shakespeare

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Bach never met Shakespeare. Sorry about the clickbait title. Stick around though, because as always with this site we’re probing the creative process and what inspires it. In the past few weeks I’ve personally been going down a deep well with Johann Sebastian Bach, father of western music, and how his mind worked. I’m finding useful lessons there that I thought you might find helpful if you’re a creator yourself. Special focus here is on writing, hence the Shakespeare reference.

And you don’t have to know a thing in the world about music.

Join me?

(There are loads of Youtube videos about what makes Bach great, but two excellent books from which I’ve drawn heavily here are Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner and Why Bach? An Audiovisual Presentation by Daniel Brown.)

Bach composed music primarily for Sunday church services and often wrote the music for existing hymns or verses written by someone else. It was an aesthetic puzzle for him to solve, and sometimes a difficult one. Certain notes clash with one another and can sound harsh. We (somehow) almost universally feel kind of sad with certain notes and sequences and kind of happy with others. We (again, somehow) expect certain notes to show up after others or else it feels weird and lacking closure. For whatever reason, western ears generally agree on quite a bit about how musical notes should string together into music. Strange, but true.

Bach knew his craft well, understood these basic principles and expectations, and steered his listeners like a sailing ship by leveraging them in his works. He didn’t settle for just solving these aesthetic puzzles but broke every rule and went to places with his imagination that suited his own dazzling, soaring intellect in the process. That helped lay the foundations for western music as we know it today.

I noticed the more I read about Bach’s compositional tactics that those who were analyzing the music would very often say things along the lines of “you expect this, but he does that”. Once you get your head around these fundamental expectations I’m talking about above, it gets a bit clearer what Bach was doing, and what it can mean for a writer or creator in different fields than his.

Here’s an example: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. This (in my opinion) is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Bach fit this masterpiece on top of some stanzas written over 60 years earlier by a minister and musician named Martin Janus in 1661. It opens with Bach’s melody, followed by the first phrase of Janus’ chorale, then shortly thereafter the 2nd phrases of both works coincide flawlessly. The freedom with which he went gonzo with his own melody yet managed to fit without seams over the hymn is my point.

Bach was dancing.

Another example is particularly moving and gets to the heart of the spirituality and emotions that moved him when he was composing.

Sleepers Awake, a Voice Is Calling: An obscure 16th century pastor named Philipp Nicolai had just taken the job in the town of Unna when plague struck and killed half its people. His parsonage overlooked the cemetery. Suffering deeply, yet wishing to record his meditations to encourage the survivors, Nicolai wrote a collection he called “Mirror of Joy” which emphasized shining your own light in expectation of great things, not terrible ones. Bach built his own work on top of Nicolai’s hymn in a masterclass of weaving musical compositions.

In his piece, Bach presents his new melody entirely, then repeats the first three phrases (with 2nd and 3rd swapped) but with Nicolai’s melody in the choral part underneath. Again, separately they sound nothing alike, yet together they are flawless. At one point, Bach’s melody repeats its first phrase over Nicolai’s phrase that does not.

Did you catch that?

Bach wrote something that can repeat its melody and match perfectly in two different places on another melody. In this perfect weave, he was also weaving Nicolai’s times and his own – for Bach’s audience too was being encouraged to shine their own lights into a world that needed hope.

Last example, and another gorgeous one:

Air from the 2nd movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major. Click the link and listen to the incredibly talented Evangelina Mascardi (who has said she spent up to 6 months at a time learning Bach’s songs). You can stop after the first half when she pauses and moves on to ‘Gavotte’ to see my point here.

Listen closely for the melody – you’ll catch it right away. It’s really beautiful and poignant. People tend to describe this as, not sad…not happy…but something rather that reminds them of happy times, good memories, good friends. Keep listening though. You want him to repeat it. He doesn’t, not exactly. He adds all manner of embellishments and hesitations and dances around the melody he knows you want to hear again.

He gives you what you want, but embroiders it.

So what’s all this got to do with writing?

Recently, I came across a thorough article describing 49 effects possible in literature. At the time I first read it, I was just starting to examine Bach’s approach to composition and his freedom to innovate with tuning, different instruments, and other elements. I was seeing him play with his listener’s expectations, creating tension and dissonance and delaying resolution till it suited his dramatic purposes.

And I was seeing the same possibilities in this list of literary effects, such as pathos, irony, comedy, and others. Readers most certainly have common expectations and tropes, which can be similarly placed in opposition to each other. Bach mastered the elements of his craft and innovated wildly, though always staying in close view of what he knew were his listener’s expectations of resolution.

Maybe some principles apply here:

  1. Consider your characters and their dynamics. Anticipate the readers’ expectations and play with that. Don’t shortcut and focus on “subverting”, which is obnoxious and unpleasant.
  2. Innovate, but stay in view of the compelling engine driving the story…the central character dynamics. Don’t mess that up in your desire to make the plot happen.
  3. Break the attention barrier with something energetic and wild. Bach’s church audience was rude, reading papers, talking loudly, ogling women, endlessly walking in late and leaving early. He demanded their attention with his craft. We should do the same.
  4. Know the elements of your own craft. Be a professional – no obvious mistakes with grammar or plot holes, terrible dialogue or vague character motivations. It breaks the magic.
  5. Feel it. Bach felt it in his soul. He was talking to God. If we’re going to try and make something new for the world, at least we could try and feel it as we do so.

Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed a layman’s take on Bach. Impressive genius, even if you don’t really understand all the nuances of what he was doing.

Till next time,

“Jeweled Warriors In The Merchant Wars” – Free New Salt Mystic Lore Card!

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Grailrunner is excited to announce the latest addition to our growing Salt Mystic Lore Card set: “Jeweled Warriors In The Merchant Wars”. Download it for free here!

Welcome to the Grailrunner Story Arcade!

If you need to know a bit more about what we’re doing with Salt Mystic, feel free to check this out here.

In the Salt Mystic Sourcebook And Core Rules, we define seven different ages into which the long history of this setting is divided. The brief snapshots there allowed us to drop maddening hints of some intriguing twists and adventures that occurred thousands of years ago, but we never really get the chance to dig in to those earlier time periods. Maybe one day these will all be their own novel series or art lines – but for now, we’re in the Guardian Age, man. It’s enough work bringing that to glorious life!

So this new lore card was a chance to flesh something out that I thought was interesting. There’s already a guy named Murmur in the Salt Flats character cards that has an Artificial Intelligence sprite inhabiting his armor that we’ve always thought was funny. This lore card was where we go big with that.

Horrifyingly big.

As for the art, as always it’s a photobash and paintover of some different elements pulled from a few sources. The background is an AI-generated image of a battlefield. The warriors’ jeweled armor was inspired by Grant Morrison’s 18 Days art book (which accompanied the web series), based on the storyline of the Mahabharata. The carbine was built in Blender as a 3d model, textured with a steel plating from Textures.com. The ruby faceplate of the guy turning on his general was taken from a freely available png – literally just googled “ruby gemstone” or something like that.

I especially love the way the smokey flames turned out, spewing from that fellow’s gauntlet-based plasma weapon. There are at least three overlays on that, all from Nucly. I wanted it to seem like he’s firing that weapon up, and his general has just now realized that he’s stepped over some kind of line.

Anyway, we hope you like the art piece and accompanying flavor text. Let us know what you think.

Till next time,

The Battle Of Hernani And The Creative Arms Race With AI

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You likely know if you’ve been here at Grailrunner before that we obsess over the creative process. In fact, the whole point of the company, this site, and essentially anything we’ve produced is to dissect, pick apart, rewire, engineer, and shove ammo clips into the imagination. It’s in the logo, man.

Dreams are engines. Be fuel.

Anyway, there was an interesting riot at a theater on February 25, 1830 in Paris that has a few things to teach us about how to break ground in creative work. And as creators right now, with the looming and worldshaking onset of AI disrupting every outlet of creative work and threatening that age-old security we were all told that computers can’t create, it’s more important than ever that we get really, really good at doing new things.

New things, man. New things. Now AI can’t really do that.

What is the context on this Hernani thing?

Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables and the Hunchback Of Notre Dame. That’s where you might know him from.

This guy:

He was a playwright too though, and in his day the structure and content and expectations of plays were widely agreed and rigid. You didn’t mess around with these things if you wanted to be treated seriously and not look like a disrespectful clown. After all, Aristotle analyzed storytelling in tragic drama at an almost divine level 2,000 years before in his Poetics and designed the perfect tragedy, defining the unities:

  1. Unity of time: the action of the play must unfold over a single day
  2. Unity of place: the action must take place in a single setting
  3. Unity of action: the play should comprise only one plot

If you abided by these principles with your play, which was the norm for hundreds of years in Europe, then Aristotle’s intense study of impact and memorability and propriety assured you that you had a well-constructed play. Why deviate from that – you think you know better than Aristotle?

Another non-negotiable was the clear definition of genre: comedy or tragedy. More than just branding, this was crucial to the audience’s interpretation of your work. Is it supposed to be funny, and so pratfalls and misunderstandings and goofy idiots abound? Or is it supposed to be sad, and so have larger-than-life people make key mistakes based on their natures and lose it all?

And finally, you didn’t show things that were grotesque, things that were compulsively ugly or distorted. It was just improper and undignified.

Oh no, what did Victor do?

Well, he wrote this. It’s the preface to a play called Cromwell. It pissed a lot of people off and set the stage for the riots to come later. A few tastes of his blasphemy:

“But the age of the epic draws near its end. Like the society that it represents, this form of poetry wears itself out revolving upon itself. Rome reproduces Greece, Virgil copies Homer, and, as if to make a becoming end, epic poetry expires in the last parturition. It was time. Another era is about to begin, for the world and for poetry.”

“…the grotesque is one of the supreme beauties of the drama.“

“‘But,’ the customs-officers of thought will cry, ‘great geniuses have submitted to these rules which you spurn!’ Unfortunately, yes. But what would those admirable men have done if they had been left to themselves? At all events they did not accept your chains without a struggle.”

Victor was saying that the unities of time and place arbitrarily handicapped the dramatic potential. Check pages 15 and 16 for his blast on unity of place – it being silly to think so much important action would happen in this one spot, and what blah-blah is needed to tell the audience what’s going on elsewhere! He continues on pages 16 and 17 destroying unity of time – it being equal nonsense to expect important events all to happen in a day.

And wow, is that one something Hollywood sequel writers should read!

In summary, he felt the rigid genre conventions of comedy and tragedy were limiting his ability to express wide ranges of emotion and experience, the unities were unnecessary constraints that forced silly adjustments, and, most importantly, he didn’t care for the convention of avoiding the grotesque. He called for a new genre to explore the essentials of life, with beauty and ugliness, good guys and monsters, gold-laid parlors and miserable alleys.

“These rules, man! They’re cramping my style!”

What was Hernani then?

Well, Cromwell was too big in scope to even be staged. It’s 400 pages long and at one point needs the British parliament to enter the stage. His next attempt got banned. Then he wrote Hernani, which censors possibly felt was too ridiculous to bother with.

Plot? Two noblemen and a mysterious bandit are in love with the same woman. A conspiracy is in play, and things get dark ending with a wedding and poison.

Rules broken? Well, the story unfolds over 6 months at various settings. That was naughty of him. You weren’t supposed to show death, violence, or intimate scenes. Hernani opens in the lady’s bedroom and closes with three suicides. Equally naughty. You were supposed to adhere strictly to your chosen genre: comedy or tragedy, but he incorporated farcical dialogue and had a king hiding in a wardrobe. Language should have been clean and high-minded, but he included lines like:

“Is this the stable where you keep the broomstick you ride at night?”

You weren’t supposed to let your lines of a sentence from one line of verse to another, but that happened too. Characters were supposed to be one-note caricatures generally who didn’t change, to represent some trait or concept, though he fleshed them out far more than was typical and allowed transformations (such as Don Carlos becoming a good emperor). And he used stage directions like a madman, which was also strange.

So this happened:

Why was there a riot though?

These Parisians had been through revolutions and guillotines, deaths and restorations of kings, and were reading on a daily basis about massive changes in nations such as Italy and Germany where entire systems of government were being born while others faded. France was still in turmoil politically and censorship was a powerful tool to shut down free thinkers and radicals. Breaking rules in art was linked to breaking other rules, perhaps those tied to abiding by norms set by those in charge.

Today in a politically split country we might feel threatened by those who question gender norms or who bend traditional family structures because we fear what a loss of those foundations might mean for the country’s future, what impact it might have on our children. You see how mad everybody gets about that every day on Twitter. Here in Paris, it was perhaps as scary for them.

In fact, many of those same rioters a few months later in July ousted King Charles X and replaced him with  “Citizen King” Louis-Philippe.

Why is this a big deal?

My point today is that it was risky and insightful for Victor Hugo to see these literary conventions as the limiting factors they were and to dare to break them. And when he broke them, it wasn’t for shock value as so many charlatans today offer instead of talent. Victor didn’t break the rules because he was a renegade, he felt they limited his storytelling.

He kept his eye on the point behind what he was doing: telling an impactful story. Maybe Hernani’s plot is nonsense, but that wasn’t what he wanted anybody to take away from it anyway. Read the Cromwell preface. He wanted a new genre free of limits.

Impressive. Impressive to even notice the limits. How many conventions do we abide by and not even notice. Are our prison walls invisible?

What does this have to do with AI ?

AI writing tools like ChatGPT are not going away. They’re seeping into our marketing copy, our kids’ essays, blog and social media posts, even podcast scripts. As creators, there is one important fact behind any AI-based technology like these which can be an asset for us. They are trained on data sets and those data sets include conventions and limitations like those Victor Hugo raged against.

Ask ChatGPT to write you a story about King Arthur or a D&D scenario and it’s painfully generic. We as creators are in an arms race then, as those tools get better. We have to get better.

Let’s go fight our own Hernani then.

Till next time,

Who Wrote The First Science Fantasy Story And Why?

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Lucian Of Samosota’s True History…I can’t believe I waited this long to read this incredible story! I’ve read it twice now, and I’ll probably read it again. You just need to know about this if you are at all into astounding works of the imagination or gonzo science fantasy. For my part, I’m endlessly fascinated by the creative process, particularly when great creators stretch themselves to build what Stephen King has called a “gosh-a-mighty steam shovel of the imagination” – a paraphrase from an old introduction to the Dark Tower.

You may know we recently interviewed Daniel Sell of the Melsonian Arts Council, writer and designer behind the Troika roleplaying game. His mind is wired like this too, and in Troika, you might encounter among the crystal spheres a ‘Befouler Of Ponds’ worshipper of the toad church, a gremlin catcher, or a thinking engine with detachable hands that can pilot a golden planar barge.

We’ve also hosted Jeff Grubb, creator of D&D’s Spelljammer, which is another mind-expanding launch into the sort of audacious, rulebreaking idea-festival I’m talking about. Spelljammer was recently revived by Wizards Of The Coast but was first born in the early, heady days of TSR. Check that link to read up on where Jeff dreamed up some of that and how it all came about. I’m just smiling thinking about all that.

But where did science fiction…or science fantasy to be more accurate…come from in the first place? Who was the first guy to put something down that we might recognize as bearing the tropes of space travel, cosmic battles, extraterrestrials, and even robots? And if we can know that, can we also ask what the heck he was thinking that led him down that creative trail?

It was Lucian. Crazy Lucian. He did all of that, and he did it in the 2nd century AD while there was still a Roman Empire.

And what he wrote, in that one cosmos-spanning epic, could seamlessly melt into a Spelljammer or Troika game session or sci fi anime even today. It’s the sort of story where you find a ponderous idea in every paragraph, an impressionist painting in words but with a compelling odyssey. It’s called the True History.

You could almost forget he was joking around when he wrote it. Here’s what he said about you, his future reader:

“It would be appropriate recreation for them if they were to take up the sort of reading that, instead of affording just pure amusement based on wit and humour, also boasts a little food for thought that the Muses would not altogether spurn; and I think they will consider the present work something of the kind. They will find it enticing not only for the novelty of its subject, for the humor of its plan and because I tell all kinds of lies in a plausible and specious way, but also because everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of miracles and fables.

“I would cite them by name, were it not that you yourself will recognise them from your reading. One of them is Ctesias, son of Ctesiochus, of Cnidos, who wrote a great deal about India and its characteristics that he had never seen himself nor heard from anyone else with a reputation for truthfulness. Iambulus also wrote much that was strange about the countries in the great sea: he made up a falsehood that is patent to everybody, but wrote a story that is not uninteresting for all that. Many others, with the same intent, have written about imaginary travels and journeys of theirs, telling of huge beasts, cruel men and strange ways of living.

“Well, on reading all these authors, I did not find much fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy. I did wonder, though, that they thought that they could write untruths and not get caught at it. Therefore, as I myself, thanks to my vanity, was eager to hand something down to posterity, that I might not be the only one excluded from the privileges of poetic license, and as I had nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance, I took to lying. But my lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar. I think I can escape the censure of the world by my own admission that I am not telling a word of truth. Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others–which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist.” -Lucian in his Introduction to the True History

Bear with me here for a synopsis, though it’s a rollercoaster ride like you can’t imagine.

Lucian and his companions set sail through the Pillars Of Hercules, encountering every manner of wonder along the way. Blown off course to an island with a river of wine, they encounter (and barely escape) chimera ladies who are part woman/part grapevine and who transform hapless sailors into vines alongside them should they get overly intimate.

No sooner than leaving that island, a rogue whirlwind whisks them up to the moon where they have arrived in the middle of an interplanetary war between the king of the moon and the king of the sun, fighting over colonization of the planet, Venus. We see hybrid lifeforms and spaceships, giant spiders spinning webs across planets, and entire fleets mobilized in a vivacious, colorful battle that is absolutely mesmerizing. For about 3 pages before he moves on to something else.

Incredible.

The solar fleet wins the battle by blocking out the light of the sun from the moon, winning their surrender. In the truce, mutual colonization is allowed with a tribute to be paid.

After a short tour of the planets and civilization out there, the sailors return to the sea on earth and quickly are swallowed by a 200 mile long whale. I want to make sure you caught that – this isn’t a Jonah and the whale story; it’s 200 miles long and has entire societies living inside it.

Of course, they wage another war, this one of conquest, and eventually have to escape the enormous whale by killing it. In the sea and among the islands (or sailing through the air), they meet everything from giant talking vegetables to talking trees to floating islands to a giant gulf in the ocean itself.

In the climax of the True History, the sailors make it to the Greek/Roman idea of heaven. It’s an island where the heroes of myth and the great philosophers and poets reside. He asks Homer all manner of questions and learns his own future. Of course there is another battle here, this one with zombies.

Not kidding here…zombies. The undead rise from their pits and wage war with the great heroes. It’s just a page or two; blink and you miss it. But it’s there.

And I need to prepare you for the ending. Remember, Lucian was joking. He was messing around, satirizing people who exaggerated their travel tales, and going as boldly and absurdly as his mind could take him.

At the very end, he…

Well, maybe you should read it for yourself to see what happens. Do that here for free.

If you do, read his Life Of Demonax and Alexander The Oracle Monger as well. Both amazing.

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Till next time,

“The Canyon Of Living And Dying” – Free New Salt Mystic Lore Card

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Grailrunner is excited to announce the latest addition to our growing Salt Mystic Lore Card set: a mood-setting, rousing vignette titled “Canyon Of Living And Dying”. Download it for free here.

Welcome to the Grailrunner Story Arcade!

Salt Mystic is our rapidly growing western science fiction setting, upon which we’re building everything from novels to games and merchandise. You can learn more about that here. Key to this innovative new way of exploring immersive storytelling is the idea of worldbuilding through a collision of art and fiction. Sometimes the art comes first, then a story is built around it. Sometimes, a story idea percolates and only starts popping after an image is crafted for it.

However it happens, we’re building out locations and settings, characters and background lore, all through experiments and inspirations that often get shared for free on social media and here on the Grailrunner site. The hope is that those of us out there who dream of adventure and exploration, of new worlds and intriguing concepts, we’ll all find a home here! And that you’ll buy books and stuff.

Definitely buy the books and stuff.

The Story Arcade is also a place for people playing the Salt Mystic tabletop wargame to find interesting settings for the battlefields they play upon. That’s where this week’s addition was born, actually.

What was the inspiration for this?

Writing this article here, I was reminded of a really well designed dungeon adventure that appeared in a Wizards Of The Coast compilation titled Ghosts Of Saltmarsh.

Spoiler alert – there is a point in this adventure where the very dungeon setting itself (a ship) starts sinking and flooding. The dungeon destroys itself, and you have to get your characters out or drown. And to me, that’s incandescent genius! I became enamored with the idea of a battlefield setting for the Salt Mystic game where the battlefield floods or sinks or catches fire or otherwise starts snuffing out characters not fast enough to survive.

Generally, I haven’t solved how to convert that to a Salt Mystic terrain book yet. Maybe one day. But one of the ideas that didn’t pan out as I thought about it was a high canyon where the battle was to be fought on crumbling rock walls. I imagined a giant stone golem at the base throwing boulders up at the armies and snatching random people away. It sounded cool, but game rules and art to make that work just didn’t click for me.

This image is what came of all that. I had the picture of a carbine gunslinger nervously clinging to a high rock wall with a derelict in the mist behind him, precariously perched in an inaccessible place.

What was the process to create the image?

Like most of the imagery I produce, this is a photobash of several elements composited together in Photoshop and painted over. The carbine weapon strapped to his hip is something I generated in Blender, but re-textured recently. The climber is a composite of two AI-generated elements and a handful of stock images, run through a filter in Photoshop and color and light graded to match. The background is a composite of two AI-generated landscapes from two different pieces of software, and I used two overlays from Nucly for lighting effects.

What about the story?

I rewrote that three times, trying to give it a western feel. The idea is a dude from a rinky-dink town in the middle of nowhere deciding that the fear of climbing up there is not as strong as his need to really live, to maybe make a name for himself. Or maybe to solve the mystery of what’s inside that derelict.

In the story, he says “to live is to burn”. I totally stole that from Harlan Ellison, who said he stole it from an Egyptian papyrus. Whoever said it first, it’s awesome.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new Lore Card. Shoot me a comment or note if you’d care to chat it up about Salt Mystic or where we’re going with all this.

Have a great week!