Enter a derelict flying oriel with Cain Blackwick in Rendel’s Vengeance, a new illustrated Salt Mystic science-fantasy adventure. Available for free now in the Story Arcade.
Life got in the way and we’ve not published a Story Arcade lore card in a while. It’s been bugging me that I need to get back into the habit of building out the Salt Mystic world with these immersive little one-shot illustrated flash fiction pieces. People seem to like them, and it’s one way to help on-board people to something I pour so much of my heart into.
To see what’s there on the Story Arcade already, smash the Explore Now button below:
But anyway, I recently took a dive into the Salt Mystic: Book of Lots to do a little solo roleplaying excursion and summoned a fun (and to me, hilarious) story of adventure and exploration that surprised me in its twists and ending. Crazy how roleplaying oracles do that – just flipping pages and answering questions, the occasional crazy decision to see what happens – and BOOM! Adventure!
We put together a new lore card with the illustrations and text of the adventure to store forever in the Story Arcade, and this is possibly something new we’ll do occasionally with that growing library, depending on how you guys feel about it. As always, these are one-page tales set in the Salt Mystic universe and something you can read in less than five minutes.
Click the page below to go straight to the new lore card:
That’s the news today. Feel free to peruse whichever lore card’s teaser or artwork draw your attention and let us know what you thought.
I’m proud that I can raise kids, hold down a pretty demanding day job, deal with adulting, and also manage to publish a novel, a tabletop skirmish game, a book of short stories, and a roleplaying game. I decided many years ago that I would focus my imagination on building out a detailed world rather than bounce around with various unrelated concepts and I feel I’ve learned an incredible amount of fantastic skills along the way.
So the world of Salt Mystic has been my imagination’s playground for over a decade now.
But one thing that sucks about being a writer, at least for me, is that I really…really…struggle to sit down and read something I wrote. I can’t squash the crippling dread that I’ll stumble across a misspelled word, a forgotten fragment I mistakenly left when I edited something, or – and this is the worst – a contradiction or plot hole. The dream I had when I designed our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, was that I finally had a doorway to step into this world I’ve spent so much time making. It’s a roleplaying game designed from the ground up for solo players but able to simply and cleanly launch you into the Salt Mystic world.
But it’s been a year and a half since I finished it and only earlier today was I able to pick it up for any length of time and peruse the introduction, skim the map, and consult some of the oracles tables in the appendix without the creeping dread peeing on my experience.
And it was kind of awesome, honestly.
Grailrunner claimed when we put this RPG out that it was “effortless roleplaying”. I tested that out by blindly following the oracles for a character generation (appearance, name, and background), an inciting rumor my character heard somewhere, a general storyline theme, a NPC I was to meet, and some places we would go. I intentionally didn’t bring anything to the experience and made an honest effort to just step inside and see who and what I would meet.
Although I wrote all that material, I did so in a mad 3-year fury of flipping through art books and random mythology texts, brainstorming, sketching random blobs, and generally letting my imagination just do what it does with abandon. The truth is – I found a lot of what I saw in my own book unfamiliar enough that it surprised me. So today I thought I’d recap the adventure that resulted with some illustrations for a more dynamic presentation. Pretty much everything that happened was just me following the guidance in the book and doing what I felt like doing along the way.
Care to join me?
*
That’s me. Cain Blackwick. I wear a big floppy hat and I’m always dirty for some reason. I say inappropriate things and offend people a lot, so no friends of any good repute. Because of something that happened to me in my past, I’m followed at a distance by a voiceless Fog Man who will probably kill me one day. For now, he just follows me and watches.
I heard a rumor in a market that the pilgrim train that leads to the Augur has left its rails and taken flight, and that it would be stopping at a tower in this little town into which I’d stumbled. Not having the money to buy a ticket, I snuck onto the train. I’m pretty good at that kind of thing. It’s called the Tanglesouls Express and it’s kind of a big deal. My Fog Man just sort of drifted up in his poisonous cloud and kept me in sight the whole time. The creep!
Unfortunately, the train drifted off its course in a thunderstorm. When the announcement warned of a layover for the night in a floating debris field, I was one of the only people who climbed outside the train to take a look around in the middle of the night. What I saw was this:
It was a derelict flying ship, seemingly built around an oriel gate. Oriels are artificial pocket dimensions, and gates like these are littered all over the place – usually forgotten. Sometimes there is treasure and wonder inside. Sometimes there are beasts that would eat you as soon as sniff you. Always a good time though! This one was just sitting there sparkling, so I jumped down off the train onto some floating debris, hopped from one piece of flotsam to another until I could grab the weathered hull.
A metallic plaque named its inner world, the world inside that gate, as Rendel’s Vengeance. I could just make out some plains and misty gray-brown blurs inside past the dimensional warping. It wouldn’t have mattered what I saw because I was going to go inside no matter what. That’s what oriels are for!
The grasslands extended to the horizon. That, I could understand. I just hadn’t expected Pteranodons in the skies. I filed that away in case I could figure out how to tame and ride one. But it was the giant walking buildings that surprised me the most. I named them “spirewalkers” since I didn’t know what they were. It looked like there were cities here once, saturated with computronium, and bits of them must have just grown legs and decided to wander off in a herd.
“Have you ever seen something like that?” I asked my Fog Man, but he only glared at me like he always does.
Anyway, I followed one of the spirewalkers to understand better what I was looking at, how they thought, and where such a thing might want to go, and eventually I came across a scrap of old parchment with a handwritten phrase on it:
“Everything is new today. And will be again tomorrow.”
That’s what it said. It seemed sappy and unhelpful but at least it meant there was likely somebody around here writing things like that. While I was looking for tracks or footprints, any kind of sign of where the person who had written that might have gone, I was attacked (if that’s the right word) by a malfunctioning golem who seemed to think he was repairing himself but needed parts from me to do it.
While I dealt with him, my Fog Man just hovered from his distance. I always wondered what that ghostly jackass would do if I was getting killed and cheating him of the pleasure of doing the deed himself. I’m still not sure because I did manage to get the golem stepped on by one of those walking buildings. And that’s when I met this fellow here:
Boston Hember was his name. He was a fairly nice guy: exiled diplomat who apparently failed at averting a cataclysmic war back home. Or something. I guess he just wanders oriels and leaves behind these poems and sunshine nonsense to make up for his failure. It would have been great had Boston showed up a little earlier than he did to help with the kooky golem who wanted to pry out my ribcage but it was still good to see another human.
He told me he’d only ever seen one other person inside this oriel and the fellow was dying when they met. Of course, this dying fellow had said something mysterious right before his last breath. They always say something mysterious with that last breath. In this case, it seemed pregnant with story potential:
“Traps all in the woods, leading to the cavern – they don’t do that for nothing.”
He felt like he’d located all the traps leading to this supposed cavern and had them mapped pretty cleanly. Said he’d been hesitating to go alone but it was eating him up to learn what was in that cavern. Said it was fate that I’d showed up just on the day he was thinking he’d go find out.
“Yeah, screw it. Let’s go.” That’s me. And going to mysterious places was why I was here anyway.
Cutting that part short, we eventually got inside that trapped cavern and found an opening to another grassland plain, or maybe a part of this world we couldn’t access otherwise. And you wouldn’t believe what we found over there!
Another oriel gate! Inside the first pocket dimension we were wandering around in was a second gate leading to who knows where! The only trouble was it was locked and chained up, with dimensional energy leaking out in blinding blue-green light. Something in Boston’s voice, in his eyes maybe, told me he had actually been this far already and knew exactly what we were going to find there. I couldn’t have explained how I knew that other than it was just a feeling (and appendix 7).
“Nope,” I said. “Things that are chained are chained for a reason.” With that, I was planning on leaving Boston to his misadventure of releasing some hell-beast or cult or whatever was on the other side of that gate when the guy pulled a knife on me!
I didn’t kill him. I’m not that kind of adventurer. I did take his knife, though. It was a pretty sweet braided blade with some shape-changing morphium impregnating the steel. I liked the way it rippled when you held it out in front of you. When I left Boston there, he’d probably had much better days and might still be scheming to come after me one day.
“He can stand in line, right, Foggie?” I said that to my Fog Man but the creep just glared at me.
So, anyway, I thought better of the chained gate thing and of chasing supposed enigmatic comments from hypothetical dying men and took a whole different approach altogether.
You wouldn’t believe all the loot still lying around in the drawers and closets of these old walking buildings!
*
I hope you found that as amusing as I did. It was really fun to treat this wonderful book like something I didn’t sweat and stress over for years and just let it do its thing as it was designed to do.
If you want to buy a copy of SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for yourself, just smash the Buy It Now button below:
And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Till next time,
I’m not against AI as a better Google. For example, I needed to know recently whether crickets still croak at night in late autumn and what wild mustard would smell like if you sat on it. These are the kind of weird questions writers come up with and – if you’re me – completely block the ability to progress with the work until they’re answered.
Here are some others (and trust me, all totally legitimately asked in the context of feverishly trying to complete a science fantasy novel):
What are gorilla boobs called?
Where exactly do blind people place their fingers on someone’s face to read their expression?
What is the difference between a glyph and a sigil?
What causes the black streaks beneath a crying woman’s eyes: eyeliner or mascara?
Say a man’s arm is severed and cauterized by a sentient cablesword – would it steam, bleed, smoke, or all three?
Forgive me. I like odd details when I’m reading books so I want them in my own concoctions. And I want them to be right. Something like Gemini or ChatGPT can handle these iterative conversations to answer questions like these better than a Google search. Far better and much faster.
Okay, what about the writing, though? The creation of the work itself?
I’m also not against AI handling the monotonous and thankless task of resolving thorny punctuation issues. My kryptonite punctuation errors so far have been:
I join two complete thoughts with commas rather than semicolons. I never liked semicolons. They look weird but whatever.
I forget to add commas when I use introductory phrases (“Beneath the plaque Mazewater noticed old carvings.” – missing comma after ‘plaque’
…
You know what – let’s leave that topic. I did a search for punctuation goofs I had to fix and it’s embarrassing. You get my point on an editor that can quickly resolve where a comma goes and whether to bust up a sentence is awesome.
But the writing?
Well, somewhat more controversially, I’m very much in favor of quick and dirty concept art by AI to help me visualize a character or backdrop I’m dreaming up in the way that George Lucas used Ralph McQuarrie and so many others in his own worldbuilding.
Meet Uncle Ong, for example, based on my descriptions (if you read Mazewater one day, this guy will break your heart – I promise):
So what are you saying?
Yeah, I’m writing this myself. No AI for that. As slow as I am, I still want to say I built something with my own hands. It’s why I’m in the gig in the first place.
Still, a lot of people are avoiding AI because they rightly have concerns about intellectual property and diminishing quality of work that is increasingly produced by software. Legit concerns, yes, but neither is insurmountable. I also feel that, as a creator, failing to have cutting edge AI tools in your kit is like trying to hold back the ocean with a kitchen knife.
Maybe it makes you a person of principle. But it puts you behind your competitors for sure.
I’m Brian Bennudriti, creator of the Salt Mystic universe, and I’m several years in to writing the next novel in that setting. It’s to be titled MAZEWATER. In February, I told you here about my plan to speed up how long it takes me to finish a novel. My record, unfortunately, is 7 years. I’m getting old, man. My kids are practically grown. How likely at this pace is it I finish even a handful of novels like I planned? The ideas inside my head are exploding into life but I can’t capture it in the words quickly enough. Still, it’s the same fire now that lit up my mind as a child…the love of creating an imagined world.
What I told you in that February article remains true and I believe I’m moving with more focus and less backtracking. But I saw a headline the other day that led me down an unpleasant and depressing rabbit hole.
“Nobody plays video games anymore.” That’s what it said. The reason it hit me hard was I’ve long speculated that future storytelling frontiers would be in gaming: tabletop and in large-scale video games. Much like Walt Disney and those early anime illustrators made a true art of cartoons long perceived as childishness before them, like Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman made true literature of comics, again long perceived as childishness, I’ve been convinced that games like Tainted Grail and Elder Scrolls were the future of storytelling.
Yet the article cited research by Matthew Ball, which you can learn more about here. To boil it down for you, there are too many things competing for our attention. We struggle to care about anything new, so gamers play Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Roblox, and Minecraft because it’s easier to just stay where you are. Switching costs are high to learn a new world, even if they are amazing. Everything else is high-dose dopamine in Tik Tok bursts of frenetic nonsense.
You write science fiction & fantasy! What do you care about video games?
The National Endowment for the Arts found that the share of US adults who had read any novel or short story during the preceding year declined from 45.2% in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022. The share reading any book fell from 54.6% to 48.5% over the same period. A separate analysis of the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell by approximately 40% between 2003 and 2023—from roughly 28% to 16%.
Yeah, it’s not just video games, man. We’re all hooked on dopamine from our phones, killing our attention spans, and the economics and psychology of dealing with the learning curve and investing in new worlds is stacked very much against something new coming into the literary universe. If I make the most perfect setting and the most interesting characters with dialogue and action that pops, who will read it?
You’re depressing me.
Hold that thought. That same American Time Use Survey said those who still read spent considerable time doing so: approximately 97 minutes on days when they read in 2023. Publishers Weekly reported that US print sales rose slightly in 2025 and remained above pre-pandemic levels, while romance and romantasy experienced strong growth. Audiobook revenue rose 9% in 2025 to $2.43 billion, and fiction accounted for approximately 71% of audiobook sales.
The folks who ARE reading are still voracious about it. If you’ve ever been to a comic or pop culture convention, you’ll meet the most incredible people in the world. And they’re all dreamers who want to enter worlds like this. What I’m saying is they’re still out there, and they’re still consuming massive amounts of content. What is weakening is the audience’s willingness to enter a long work before it has proven its value. People still devote hundreds of hours to stories they love. They are less willing to devote six mediocre hours to finding out whether they might eventually love something.
So what does that mean for storytelling?
I believe I’ve mentioned Yu-Kai Chou and his mind-bending framework for leveraging gaming psychology for human motivation and change management which he calls Octalysis. Read about that here. He’s the first guy I ever heard talk about the steps of game design:
Scaffolding (how players gain a sense that the game is going somewhere so they invest more heavily)
Endgame (how players receive a sense of accomplishment and reward)
I’m seeing parallels for this set of steps in the future of storytelling, honestly. I see an increasing importance on merchandise, art, and social media interaction to draw people in with the hook for the imagined world. I see that future storytellers may have to be more visual thinkers and incorporate strong, intriguing visuals that can be sticky in the minds of people who chance across them. Maybe more than that though, I’m struck by the increasing importance of the opening. That first five pages. If you don’t hook someone there, then you won’t hook them at all. Too much is waiting to steal their attention away, and much of that is optimized through algorithms with their big, pointy teeth to be better at stealing attention than the writer is.
*
Just a few thoughts as I round the corner at about 80,000 words in the work in progress. I thought I’d be ending the book around this word count but I will very likely push it to ~100,000 words. It feels more correct at that length. I promise I’ve trimmed and cut all the fat! I’m not rambling. It’s a tight and intriguing ride in my opinion. Just needs to simmer a bit for these wonderful paper people to feel real and for the world to shake like it needs to.
Anyway, I hope this has been food for thought. I’ll share more about Mazewater over the coming months as things finish up. If you have any questions about it, feel free to let me know.
There was a writer of fantasy stories in the early 1900’s that helped lay the tracks for the books and films of imagination we enjoy today. Tolkien read him – supposedly gave a copy of the book we’re talking about today to Clyde Kilby in preparation for helping the Professor compile and develop The Silmarillion. H.P. Lovecraft wrote a poem about that same book. In fact the author, Lord Dunsany, inspired creators as far-ranging as Clark Ashton Smith, Guillermo del Toro, Neil Gaiman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Arthur Clarke.
He’s kind of a big deal.
But this particular book of 14 stories though, The Book of Wonder (available free here), was a real game-changer. Most, if not all, of the stories first appeared in a lifestyle magazine titled The Sketch from 1910 – 1911, then were compiled into the single volume for publication in 1912. Taken together, they read like a series of dream-visions, and feel comfortable and sleepy, like they’re being told in a warm voice by a crackling fireplace. It’s a collection of short fantasy tales about strange kings, cities, gods, and wanderers whose desires—for wealth, beauty, knowledge, or escape—lead them into eerie, dreamlike adventures. The tales often turn on irony or fate, showing how wonder and curiosity can just as easily bring enchantment as loss, transformation, or quiet doom
But there’s a real injustice that was done to this book, and Grailrunner is fixing it today with one of the coolest freebies we’ve ever given away. There will be a free download link at the end of this article, but first you have to know what injustice we mean and get as annoyed as we are about it!
Let’s talk about Sidney Sime for a second. He did this painting, which is how I first came across him.
Isn’t that gorgeous?! Honestly, this is the kind of thing art is for! It’s called The City of Never, and it sends my mind wandering! I really love it.
Sime started his working life in a coal mine, almost dying in an accident, before working in various jobs ultimately winding up a sign painter. He managed to get some of his eerie, dreamlike art published in The Sketch Magazine as illustrations, and that’s where Dunsany first saw his work. When Dunsany contacted him to illlustrate his work, The Gods of Pegana, it began a long and incredible collaboration that lasted the rest of Sime’s life.
Then something with the feeling of destiny happened. We’ll let Dunsany tell you about that:
“I found Mr. Sime one day, in his strange house at Worplesdon, complaining that editors did not offer him very suitable subjects for illustration; so I said: ‘Why not do any pictures you like, and I will write stories explaining them, which may add a little to their mystery?’”
-Lord Dunsany
Wait a minute, what are you saying?
I’m saying that Dunsany hadn’t written The Book of Wonder or its component stories when he asked Sime to just paint something. Anything! He just suggested that an artist with a wild imagination go wild and see where it led him. Then, Dunsany would make something of it.
That sounds cool. How did Sime decide what to paint, then?
He had a wonderful imagination. Still, Sime’s images often look as though they were found through the act of drawing and painting, not fully locked down in advance. You can see it in a few recurring traits:
Dream logic in the compositions: odd appendages, improbable towers, and strange silhouettes that feel less like academic illustration and more like an artist noticing possibilities inside the developing image and following them.
Forms that seem to emerge out of texture and shadow rather than being mechanically planned from the start.
Architecture and figures that feel invented midstream, as if one shape suggested the next.
Selective detail, where one area becomes highly specific while other parts stay loose and suggestive, which is often a sign of discovery rather than rigid predesign.
Examples?
Yeah, I see the dreamy, moody thing you’re talking about. So what’s the travesty with this book?
In my mind, if Sime’s art came first and the stories were largely built from them, then this book is a composite work that should be inseparable. The art should be included in every reprint and copy. In fact, the images ought to come first before each story so the reader can follow the process for themself. You should be able to see the art cleanly, clearly, in good resolution, ideally in color, then proceed to the story to which it is attached.
But that’s just not the case.
I argue that in the far majority of cases where this incredibly influential and popular book is made available, it is without illustrations at all or is included with revised artwork. As if the Sime work was just some bumpkin’s outdated attempts at something a modern artist could exceed or modernize.
Worse, it’s a maddening trail of low-res scans and dead-ends to even find decent reproductions of Sime’s work at all! Even the dedicated Sime gallery in Surrey doesn’t contain the bulk of the images from The Book of Wonder. Dunsany’s castle supposedly houses the majority of Sime’s work that was meant for Dunsany’s writings, but you have to arrange a visit to see them!
That does seem annoying. And a shame. So what did you do about it?
We produced a pdf version with a new front and back cover, collecting the best possible scans and most accurate text, and laid them all out in a beautiful spread with original “historiated intials” to begin each story.
Like this one:
Was it hard to find the art scans?
It was! Far harder than it should have been. We used the original 1912 version as the guiding light matching the images to the right stories. Everything needed cleanup in Photoshop. In one case, there was a lost artwork that didn’t actually appear in the 1912 version but DID appear in the Dec 1910 issue of The Sketch Magazine. Thanks to Douglas Anderson, original investigation result linked here for tracking down the lost image which likely inspired The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater.
My main point with this labor of love is that Sime deserves co-credit for this incredibly influential work of fantasy. It’s a travesty that it was this hard to find half-way decent scans of his artwork that needed this kind of editing to even be presentable. If there was enough time in the day, we would contact Dunsany Castle and try and influence them for better scans and a new memorial edition, maybe including some correspondence between them to liven up the work. That would be amazing.
What do you hope to accomplish with this, then?
Just inspiration. Like everything else we do here at Grailrunner, we wanted to bring you the story of this fateful collaboration and give you the chance, as best we can, to gaze at the art for yourself, dream up something original for them if you like, before stepping into the wonderful mists of what Dunsany did with them.
Let’s have that download link!
*
That’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope you enjoy the compilation and restored art. If you DO go inside The Book of Wonder to spend time with these two miracle-workers, it will be time well spent.
Oh, wow, if you could have been with me at a rainy beach in New Hampshire in 2015! I had a half-day to myself, off from work with a rainy New England afternoon free. I drove from Portsmouth where I was working down to Hampton Beach. It was cold, gray, and everything was closed for the winter. There was one couple on the beach trying to make a romantic walk of it, but it was the slow, drizzling, mean kind of cold rain that soaks into your bones.
Most of the framework and plot of the novel I’d been writing for years had been rattling around in my head since my time in the Navy in the late 90’s. That’s a long time to cook the soup! I get that. And I’d been writing that book, my first one, for over 6.5 years. Almost 7. But I was close. All the threads I wanted to tie up were pretty much tied. I was planning to see if I could just park near the beach, prop open the laptop there in the car to the pat-pat of light rain, and see what I could do to carry things over the finish line.
There’s a statue of a lonesome woman staring at the sea there. I was down the beach some from her, facing the water same as she was. It was a great vibe, honestly. Not physically comfortable, but amazing for creative inspiration. And I did it! That last image…the last conversation…the final closeout I’d been looking for…it went onto the page all by itself. I couldn’t believe it! No one in the world to tell about it, and no one would probably even understand what a big deal that was for me, but it was truly done. Not rushed and not compromised.
Done, the way I wanted it.
What’s the big deal about that?
Writing a novel is challenging to every aspect of your life. Time spent writing is time away from your family. It’s time not working on your day job. And it’s hard – ridiculously hard! Stories grow more complex than you wanted, and characters change from what you made them to be. Dialogue that sounded awesome in your head repeats back as strained, alien, and as plot dumps when that wasn’t what you intended at all.
I was trying to earn my way, be a husband and a father, but still turn visions in my head into something real that could say something meaningful and outlast me: a world people could step inside. But I felt selfish every time I wasn’t playing a game with my wife or watching a movie with my daughter or taking my son fishing. Writing a novel is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most life-altering. It changed me for the better.
Okay, so what are we talking about here?
It takes too long. That’s what I’m saying. Need to fix that. I’m over 4 years in to the novel I’m writing now. Not cool if I’m still banging away on it for three more years.
Talk to me, Grailrunner – how do we speed up the creative process?
If you’re a novelist, like the kind of folks who might read Grailrunner and nod, you feel the tug of two opposing forces:
You want your story clean, logical, tight, like a well-made blade
You write in spirals, rewrites, loops, hollows — messy, intuitive, iterative
Tell me I’m not alone in that. Anyway, it feels like a flaw to rewrite because it feels like starting over. I’m thinking in layers, but trying to polish before I’ve built the foundation.
But it struck me recently that concept artists have figured this out!
Many visual artists, particularly concept artists, work in ways that seem counter-intuitive. They don’t sit down with a crystalline vision of what they expect the final image to look like. Instead they check the brief and then:
Lay down marks, then react
Let accidental shapes guide the next decision
Build texture before form
Play off of unexpected accidents
Iterate forward, not backward
I wondered for myself then – this idea of a visual artist pressing ahead with abandon, careless of the final picture, knowing there will be revisions later but enjoying the process for itself and riffing off what they lay down – could that help me?
And?
Here are five principles I’m locking in for myself – maybe they’ll be helpful for you:
1. Generate the back cover text now
I built the entire cover for the book, including the artwork, but more importantly the back cover text. I printed it off in glorious color and even folded it into the size and shape of the final product so I could hold it in my hand. I needed that kind of focus on the story I’m telling (and why) to help me trim shiney bits and bobs that kept raining down from the sky. It’s a laser beam now. Anything not feeding that back cover promise is out!
2. Tell someone the one-line summary of what the book is about
My brother surprised me with the question when I was hip-deep in an action sequence and I hated my ill-prepared, off-the-cuff answer so much I called him two days later with a sharper and better one. Now, it’s like a mantra in my head helping me stick to that promise too. Like the back cover exercise, but even tighter!
3. Get to know the characters better before forcing them into a pre-defined plot
I spent some quality time just extrapolating for myself on what the main folks care about, what they’ve been up to when they’re not “on screen”, and some great backstory that might never make it to the page. AI tools like ChatGPT can accept your work-in-progress manuscript and engage with you in full conversations in those character voices. Crazy way to create a work of art, but an interesting way to immerse yourself in your own story!
4. Draft without editing – for real this time
I press ahead now on the chapter at hand. Just blast it out as intended, almost in a rush, to lay out the skeleton of what’s supposed to happen and let these people do what I know they would do. Tomorrow, I’ll go back over it again and catch the nonsense and the plot holes, the contradictions. Like the concept artist checking the brief, but then just laying down random marks according to what seems right, I’m applying that to the written page. The difference is the freedom now to avoid stopping constantly, in real-time, to worry over whether something makes sense right now and stop to fix it immediately.
5. Accept it when cool things need to die because they no longer fit
Oh, it’s hard! I liked Ilianore a lot, but you’ll never meet her. The climactic spearing from the sky – pretty sure that’s gone too. A midnight flight on a train – also gone. I’m trying, man. I’m trying to turn things loose now when they seemed so amazing but just don’t match up with where things are going or what these people would do. I’m considering short funerals for some, but for sure I’m pasting some of that old text into a document to save in a folder somewhere in case it ever needs to come back to life. Director’s cuts, sort of.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. These principles are speeding things along for me, at least. And I’m noticing a lot less hair growing on the plot these days. Less massive revisions are even necessary. Let’s hope that’s the process working its magic and not also my imagination.
Here at Grailrunner, we chase imagination as craft. Anything we can bring you that lights the fire of your creativity is fair game, with a special bend towards speculative fiction and fantasy. If you’ve got a willingness to tinker, you should find something here you can use, remix, or otherwise refine for whatever literary, roleplaying, or artistic wonders you’re cooking!
Today’s freebie is a really interesting one for the tabletop crowd, especially anyone who gets that nostalgic, electric feeling when you crack open old-school adventure content and your brain instantly starts building rooms, traps, villains, and bad decisions.
What’s the idea?
We wanted to turn classic modules from old Dungeon Magazine issues into a listen-able conversation
So, we generated a podcast-style episode using Google’s NotebookLM “Audio Overview” feature: one of those “wait…this is actually useful” tools that can transform your source material into an audio discussion format.
And the source material we fed it is a proper slice of RPG history (which you can download for free thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive – links below):
That’s the on-ramp period: Dungeon Magazine still finding its voice, still doing that early TSR-era thing where the tone can swing from earnest peril to delightfully oddball in the space of a page. It’s an incredible “creative compost pile” for modern GMs: hooks, maps, structures, pacing tricks, and that evergreen lesson that adventures are engines.
What is this (and what is it not)?
This is not a replacement for reading the magazines. It’s not “here are the adventures word-for-word.” Think of it as:
a guided audio tour of themes, adventure structures, and GM sparks
a way to re-encounter old material when you’re driving, cleaning, sketching, or prepping
a fast way to ask: What’s in here that I can steal, remix, and make new?
We like AI tools as levers: ways to turn raw source inspiration into momentum, while still being upfront that AI was used.
Why Dungeon #1–#5?
Because they’re early enough to feel like a time capsule, but polished enough to still be usable at the table. The first five issues show the magazine’s core promise: a buffet of adventures with different moods and play styles. Exactly the kind of variety that keeps a campaign from turning into one long corridor.
Also, if you’re the kind of creator who likes grabbing one great detail: an encounter concept, a villain posture, a dungeon rhythm, and letting it domino into a whole scenario, these issues are loaded with that stuff.
Why NotebookLM for this?
NotebookLM’s Audio Overview is basically a “make my sources talk back to me” button. Google describes it as turning documents and other materials into an “engaging discussion.” blog.google
And that’s the magic. The format doesn’t feel like a lecture. It feels like you’ve got two curious nerds in the room pulling interesting threads out of the stack. For RPG prep, that’s gold because prep is often just asking better questions about material you already have.
What’s the Grailrunner angle?
If you’ve read our recent posts, you know the theme: build year by year, make interesting things, share freebies, keep the creative engine running.
This podcast episode is exactly that energy and another little proof-of-concept that says:
What if “reading old RPG material” became listening to it think out loud and THAT sparked your next session?
Smash the Podcast Announcement image below to give it a listen for free:
I’d love to know what hits you:
Which issue had the best “I’m stealing that” moment?
Did the audio format surface anything you’d normally skim past?
What should we feed NotebookLM next: old Dragon editorials? a run of White Dwarf? classic sci-fi pulp?
We’ve got a lot cooking for 2026, and if the last year taught us anything, it’s that the best stuff often starts as a weird little experiment you almost didn’t try.
Best day of the year. No doubt at all. I love Christmas in all its crazy-train, circus-riot, flashing chili peppers. I’m sorry if it’s not your jam, and I completely get that for some people. But for me, it’s a warm, crackling fire and pumpkin pie, making the dog wear a goofy sweater, eating at Harvey’s in Kansas City at Union Station, snacking on exotic candy and cookies from World Market, and just enjoying family.
I hope yours has in store for you whatever warms your heart.
2025 was another fun building year for Grailrunner. We published our bibliomancy RPG Salt Mystic: Book of Lots in the Spring and submitted to the Ennie Awards. No dice on the Ennie’s (see what I did there, bibliomancy fans?) but a good experience nonetheless. Following that, we rebooted the Grailrunner store, including the Discovery Series of t-shirts and also started selling our first art prints there. Click the “Shop Now” button to check that out.
Upcoming, we’ve got two Grailrunner novels still in the works: Mazewater (set in the Salt Mystic universe) and a horror novel likely to be titled Line (set in what we hope to launch as a series of blues-saturated highway terror stories we’ll call Highway of Ashes).
We’re also refreshing the art on the Salt Mystic tabletop skirmish game. That’s particularly exciting because feedback has always been that people wish we hadn’t gone with the 3D art of the original. We’re fixing that, so be patient. So far, they look fantastic – there are just a lot of them and only so much time in the day (and budget).
I’m hoping in 2026 we can at least get started on a marvelous idea that’s been bubbling around the Grailrunner creation station for a few months now: a fantasy fishing roleplaying system to be called Dreamwater. If we can get this put together, and if you at all see the attraction of sitting by a beautiful lake with a fishing rod in hopes of catching a magical fish that speaks and possibly changes into a fighting beast, then we’ve got your back with this one. Will be amazing.
Anyway, thanks for hanging around with us this year and stopping by to see what nonsense we get up to. I’m always interested to see where people are that read our posts – drop us a note here or on the Facebook page to stay in touch. Let’s hope we can keep finding novelties of history to tell you about, fascinating creators to interview, great pulp science fiction of the past to highlight, and amazing freebies to send your way. Have a look here to see if you missed anything cool.
Anyway, in celebration of the year and this holiday season, I wanted to point you to some beautiful and nostalgic Christmas illustrations to enjoy.
To honor Christmases of the past, I came across a few vintage Christmas illustrations and links to their sources that sent my mind reeling. I love the windey-turney path by which we got so many of our Christmas traditions, and these really caught my eye:
In 1821, a small illustrated paperback titled The Children’s Friend: A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve was published. It contained quite possibly the first mention and illustration of Santa’s reindeer and sleigh and predated Twas The Night Before Christmas by 2 years. It may have even inspired Clement Clarke Moore to write that poem, which of course gave us the core of our modern Santa Claus.
And of course the famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast fine-tuned the Santa we know and love today in his wonderful illustrations, many of which are compiled in a book titled Christmas Drawings for the Human Race. Here’s a link so you can take a look at the entire book. It’s a real treat to see some of these masterworks and know as you appreciate the craftmanship and warmth that these very pictures are what taught us how the jolly old elf looks and makes his way. In many ways, Nast described all this for us, and he did it to help heal America from its wounds from the Civil War.
Here are a few of those gorgeous illustrations, which are hilarious and charming. You really should take a few minutes to go see the full series of art pieces. They’re important history, but also just magical.
That’s what I wanted to bring you today. I wish for you all the joy that you can wish this Christmas and for a shining, prosperous new year.
For years we’ve been talking here at Grailrunner about how imagination works — why certain images crack open your brain, why odd bits of history or art or game design suddenly ignite a whole setting, and why creators keep coming back to the well even when the world’s noisy. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to break into exciting and innovative designs, imagery, and above everything ruling it all…to tell new stories.
OK, so what’s the freebie?
Hold on – a little context first. It was a life-changing experience for me personally to write and design our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a western-themed science fantasy roleplaying game book built around the fortune-telling mechanic of bibliomancy. I’ll tell you why. To build out the world of our signature IP at Grailrunner, I needed a ridiculously huge amount of outlandish concepts, crazy ideas, and just cool, new stuff! I kind of went down the deep well of concept art techniques like mind-mapping, thumbnail sketches and iteration, shape carving, scribble ideation, and mood boards. That stuff is like adrenalin for an imagination, honestly!
It was so impactful, in fact, that I wanted to go deeper. Yet it struck me that art school and super expensive concept art classes with some of the working masters in this field aren’t going to make sense for me. I imagine they don’t make sense either economically or logistically for a lot of folks like me. So it got me thinking I’d like a simpler, streamlined, but focused way of drilling deeper into JUST the parts of concept art that would help me – the techniques that help break your imagination’s walls to explore new ideas.
Sounds great. What did you do?
We don’t charge for AI-generated stuff at Grailrunner, and we always point out its use. In fact, we’ve built out some pretty amazing stuff that we give away just to experiment with possibilities and hopefully inspire anybody that hangs out here with us. If you keep coming back here, maybe you’ll buy a book or a game or drop a LIKE on our Facebook page. That’s the idea.
My absolute favorite giveaway so far has been an entire board game mockup set in the seas of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Awesome. I just got a Silhouette Cameo 5 for my birthday, so I’m planning to break that puppy in with the printable tokens and cards there.
And specifically now for concept art techniques?
I curated a portfolio of concept art masters, provided an outline of content for my ideal coursework for a class, and instructed ChatGPT to act as the composite concept artist (meaning all those people) and write the chapters one by one for my outline as well as a preface and afterword. Then I went chapter by chapter and had it generate impactful exercises unique to each section which a student could conduct on their own with an internet connection and pencil and paper.
I mocked up illustrations of concept art techniques and examples to ensure the book is illustrated well and clear in what it’s saying. Then I bundled all of that into a professional textbook template and converted it into a pdf.
Inside you’ll find:
A step-by-step ideation → thumbnail → refinement pipeline
Practical exercises after every major section
Guidance on using digital tools without letting them boss your imagination around
A tone that assumes you’re already creative — we’re just lighting the boosters
That sounds nice. Your header says it’s “interactive” though. What’s that about?
I told you here that I’ve used AI tools to resurrect old masters and have them critique my own art to provide detailed feedback on what I could improve. That works surprisingly well, so I added instructions in the Preface on how to upload this very pdf to a student’s own instance of ChatGPT then have the AI act as the composite author critique their own uploaded exercises.
I mean. That’s totally possible and crazy to think we can do that kind of thing for free now. Anyone upset about AI being used like this needs to…and I say this with love…recognize this kind of workflow is an unstoppable industrial revolution. Your competitors are doing it.
Give me a download link, man! You’re killing me.
Grab the masterclass, run through the first exercise tonight, and then show us what you made. We’re still building this creative network in public — the more people who are sketching, painting, kitbashing, and worldbuilding alongside us, the weirder and better things get.
Enjoy, and make sure to let us know what you think.
Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.
I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:
Who is Grailrunner?
So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.
No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.
So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.
I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.
And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.
Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.
Last week, I took a road trip down the Mississippi Blues Trail out of Memphis. It was incredible, and I might write that one up as well. Seriously, we ate at the Hollywood beside the piano where Mark Cohn was inspired to write “Walking In Memphis”, saw BB King’s famous Lucille guitar, and walked Dockery Farms where the Delta Blues were born. Amazing trip.
The only reason I mention it now though is we were headed back on a route through Little Rock and back to Kansas City when we stopped at an old antique mall. If you’ve hung around here at Grailrunner before, you well know how much we’re into old bookstores and the forgotten but mind-expanding wonders you can find on dusty old shelves. And man, have I got one for you today!
This guy here. Smash the image below for a short video showing what I mean.
It’s a hardback compilation of Harper’s Magazines from 1891 through 1892. Harper’s is a monthly magazine covering culture, finance, literature and the arts that was launched in 1850 and is still continuously published today. I didn’t have any particular fondness or interest in that magazine so much as just seeing what people read about in the 1890’s. I’m also a little obsessed with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, and I was hoping there would be a mention or two in here, and there was.
That’s why I first picked it up.
As I flipped through the pages, I was stunned by the quality and craftmanship of the pen & ink and engraved illustrations inside. I use the word carefully…stunned! Some of the artists were familiar to me, but for many of the pieces inside, I couldn’t even tell who the artist was. Credits weren’t always given, and signatures were too stylized to read.
I used ChatGPT to analyze some of the more interesting works to research the artist when it wasn’t obvious, and it was surprisingly useful for that. Often wrong, but with some caution and follow-up research, you can usually zero in on a likely name.
Thought I’d share some of these beauties with you today, and maybe introduce you to some wonder-workers of the past who could summon sparkling magic with a simple fountain pen. I’m offering 20 vintage illustrations here for admiration and craftmanship study.
Care to join me?
By Felician Myrbach
Myrbach was an Austrian-born artist and leading illustrator of the 19th century. Also acting as director of the Vienna Academy of the Fine Arts, he was known for detailed illustrations of military scenes and historical costumes. This image struck me with its sense of depth, balance of light and shadow, and elegant washes. Looks like it’s coming out of the page.
By John Reinhard Weguelin
I loved the subject here, and the haunting feel of it. The artist was J.R. Weguelin, who was primarily known for his dreamy watercolors and oil paintings, though he supplemented his income by slumming to draw masterpieces like this one for magazines.
When I came across a simple article about Native Americans, I couldn’t believe I was seeing an original Frederic Remington illustration there just as a picture for a magazine. Then another. And another. These seven images are all by Remington, and they’re all beautiful. He was known for paintings and drawings mainly depicting the American west.
These three were all by Charles Stanley Reinhart, an American painter and illustrator who was also responsible for artwork on certain silver certificates commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing said by many to be the most beautiful monetary designs ever produced by the United States. That last image, of the two guys sitting and smoking is an absolute master class in pen & ink linework. I struggle in my own drawings to avoid outlines, to use contrasting light and dark for the silhouettes, and to choose the right directions for hatching that don’t distract from the shapes and mood. Reinhart entirely nailed it with that one.
These two were by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American muralist, painter and illustrator known most for Victorian and Shakespearean subjects. Perhaps most dear to our hearts at Grailrunner, Abbey was the artist behind the famous “Quest and achievement of the Holy Grail” murals at the Boston Central Library.
I really loved these two, as they independently stuck out for me on their own merits before I realized they were by the same artist and in fact, an artist whose work I thought I knew. Charles Dana Gibson was an American artist typically cited as being the creator of the “Gibson girl”, the iconic representation of the independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century. I think that puts the poor guy in a box that is unfair, as his composition, linework and hatching are among the finest of his age. He did a little more than ads with girls in them. Seriously, these two images are firecrackers!
These two architectural pieces just made me stare in awe. I can’t draw buildings, no matter how careful I am. They always turn into heavily lined, overly simplified, often leaning, caricatures of buildings. Not my thing, unfortunately. But these two by John Tavenor-Perry (at least I think so) are masterworks. ChatGPT couldn’t do anything with that weird signature (looking like a stylized rune but supposedly initials). After some heavy back-and-forth, I think we landed on a likely artist though I’m open to correction.
By Albert Sterner, this piece is a treasure-trove of hatching. I love it. Somehow, he’s managed to keep all these disparate elements in the composition cleanly segregated: the ladies and the cushion, his legs and vest, the flowers, the chair, shadows…all of it clearly silhouetted and easily read despite being a jumble of things. No way could I have figured out how to get all that detail into a drawing without feeling I needed to strip it way down so you could tell what it was.
And now finally, the mystery piece.
This one.
I was mesmerized. It accompanies a poem by James Russell Lowell titled “His Ship”, appearing in the December 1891 issue of Harper’s Magazine. No credit given anywhere, including the “Editor’s Drawer” where many other attributions for illustrations are provided.
The signature is maddeningly concealed in the drawing. I think. Hard to say if that’s a signature or not. Here’s what I mean:
Anyway, I contacted Harper’s in case somebody’s maintaining an archive of some kind to help identify the genius who did this. It’s gorgeous. If I get any kind of response or make headway on the identification, I’ll come back and update you.
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But that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Masters of their craft in the golden age of illustration, doing what they did and generating timeless works of art. For whatever reason, and not just as an aspiring artist myself, these drawings are unearthly and hypnotizing to me.
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