If this is your first time here, Grailrunner is an indie game and fiction house with a signature IP called Salt Mystic that exists in a tabletop wargame, illustrated flash fiction hosted on this site, and a growing line of novels.
And sometimes apparel and art, but that’s because of our short attention spans.
We’re in the home stretch of finalizing a floor-to-drapes refresh of the starter set card art, tuck box design, rulebook, and landing page for the Salt Mystic game. Proofs came in Friday and there are a few places where the text is too small on the box and on one card, so we’re going to fix that and make it perfect before going live. We’ll keep you posted.
But we thought we’d offer another freebie to keep the conversation going, as many of you seem really interested in embarrassing mistakes we made along the way and the thinking behind how some of the characters or mechanics came to be. We’ll put a download link at the bottom of this post for a new lore card featuring the two war marshals for the respective factions included in the new starter set.
OK, who are those two guys in the intro art?
The bearded fellow in spikey armor is Karak, also called the Hammer of the Red Witch, and serves as war marshal for the mountain city of Alson. The tattooed guy is Segmond, also called the Loreblade, serving as war marshal of the twin cities of the Salt Flats. They’re like generals for the two starter set factions and defeating one of them is how you win the game.
What’s the big deal about them?
Guys, it isn’t like I’d ever built a wargame before! We’re talking 7 or 8 years ago, decades if you include some of the core ideas that I wound up tying in to them. I was practicing art after being out of that game for half my life, learning Daz Studio and Photoshop and Indesign at the same time, all while building out lore and game mechanics. Playtesting was a disaster, either with hand-cut card stock placeholder cards and begging family or friends or begging on Tabletop Simulator. My point is I go WAY back with these two characters. Way back. They’re probably the first two I developed for the game.
I thought today it would be interesting to tell you where they came from.
That sounds fun. Start with the spikey armor guy.
There isn’t much about Salt Mystic’s aesthetics that didn’t begin with this painting. It’s called Lost World by Sorin Bechira. Seriously, I’ve stared at this thing for hours. It’s gorgeous and sends my mind soaring. What eventually became Karak’s mighty mountain fortress city of Alson started right here. I’d say at first, all I knew about a character I needed to develop was that he came from here and he fights for this place.
I met a guy named Karak in Dallas many, many years ago – just introducing myself around some offices in an asphalt paving business and shook a guy’s hand. That was all, but the name stuck with me so I filed it away to use one day. It came immediately to my mind when this fellow first formed on the screen in Daz Studio. I’d bought some cool spikey armor on the Daz shop and tweaked it in Blender to dump some weird appendages, squeeze some things a bit, and modify the texture some. I bought a gladiator set of hair, facial hair, and body hair on the Daz Shop as well, specifically for this character. Honestly, I was just spitballing for a good look.
There’s an extremely well-titled John Wayne movie called ‘Wake of the Red Witch’. That’s another name that, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t shake. So again, I filed it away.
I was dreaming up a vile race of people who spoke in a language distinguishing only shades of pain and torture. With terrifying needle guns, they inject a computing solution into your neck forcing a trance able to make a day asleep feel like 100 years of rage-filled torture. They changed you overnight from a normal person on any street to a drooling lunatic.
Anyway, I needed a cool name for them and thought of this movie title again. Instead of the Red Witch being a boat or even a person, it’s a race of people. One you’d not care to meet.
As all that came together, I knew this fellow had spent time down there with them. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what kind of dark pact he’d made with them or how he survived their black, smoking towers. I just knew when he needed to call on them, they would reluctantly answer and bring terrible vengeance to a battlefield. In Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, the lead character occasionally calls on elementals and demons for aid (usually at a cost). I also had that in mind though these folks aren’t supernatural. You’ll see Karak’s final back story in the lore card at the bottom of this post.
How about the tattooed fellow?
That’s Segmond: the Loreblade. I’ve told the story here of Salt Mystic’s earliest stirrings in my imagination, all the way back in 1997 in Oman: a lone gunslinger, in from the salt flats, slamming open a saloon door and terrifying everyone inside. Not because of his own gun, but the fear of those he had as snipers outside or even infiltrating at those very tables. The truth is I was devouring the first three Dune books by Frank Herbert and wanted the vibe of a wasteland with sci-fi vehicles and didn’t want to rip off Herbert’s desert. So I went with salt flats. (The deadly unseen companions idea came from a scene in the 1988 action movie, Off Limits – “We’re never outgunned!” but also ninja movies).
These many years later, for Segmond’s character, I only knew I needed someone to fight for the twin cities located in the salt flats.
I had just learned how to stack png images onto skin textures in Daz and give characters tattoos. It looked great in renders so I kind of lost my mind doing that. Way too many of the card art pieces have exposed skin so I could flaunt those cool tattoos I was building. In Segmond’s case, I snatched a public domain alien rune png file and plastered it over his chest and shoulders. I had also bought some dreadlocks to gain access to woolier hair assets in Daz and thought I’d like to see dreads on the guy.
I knew he needed to be the opposite of the grumpy Karak. I pictured him grinning in battle and wondered why he’d do that. And for whatever reason, I thought of an amazing experience I had back in the late 1980’s at a friend’s house playing Call of Cthulhu.
Our party had come across a Necronomicon book that drove you mad if you looked at it. It amused me to tear off a page and stick it in my pocket (can’t believe the game master let me do that!). Later, we needed to get past a door and the NPC manning that was being a jerk. I remember knocking again, and when the guy stuck his face back in the open slot, I showed him the page.
It was hilarious and worked. Anyway, that idea of a book of stories or something that had crazy power stuck with me. Segmond carries one locked to his belt and uses it for incredible persuasion to turn opposing soldiers.
You really do stitch random things together, don’t you?
“To invent, all you need is an imagination and a pile of junk.” Thomas Edison said that. Wonderful quote.
What’s the freebie today, then?
Our Story Arcade houses a growing library of illustrated flash fiction which we call ‘lore cards’. You can peruse the artwork and brief pulp-magazine style teasers to find something that catches you eye and spend less than five minutes with any one of them. It’s a way we experiment with the over-arching narrative and build out the world brick by brick.
We’ve just added a gorgeous single-page lore card depicting Karak and Segmond alongside their canon-locked backstories. Smash the image below to download the pdf version for free. And make sure to let us know what you think!
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And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I really wish we’d gotten the typography right the first try on those proofs of the new cards and tuck box but everything will be fine. It won’t be hard to fix, and we’ll come back and let you know when everything’s live and available for sale.
Till next time,
