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—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.
A “bunny trail”is defined as a digression or tangent in a conversation, writing, or research that strays from the main point, often hopping from one related but different topic to another, like a rabbit darting through fields; it can be a useful, curiosity-driven exploration or a time-wasting distraction.
I sometimes feel like that describes me a little too well.
Anyway, happy new year! Let’s kick 2026 off with a new bunny trail and some freebies! This one’s for card game enthusiasts, folks interested in gaming history, and I’m adding a twist for game masters of RPG’s that would like to add some authentic wild west gambling into their next campaign.
Cool?
Before the holidays, I read a biography of legendary lawman, Wyatt Earp titled Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller. Great read, by the way, but not my point today. I catch odd things in between the lines sometimes when I’m supposed to be paying attention to the main storyline, and one thing that snatched my attention early was Earp’s passion for a card game I’d never heard of called Faro. It sounded awesome; I was surprised it wasn’t more popular now. They used to call it “Bucking the tiger” because some card decks had tigers on their backs. And of course that only makes it more awesome.
How do you play?
The main mechanic of the game is as follows:
One dealer, multiple players. Standard 52 card deck with no Jokers. Before them on the table is a spread of cards on which they’ll place their bets representing one each of a suit (so Ace is 1, then 2-10 and the face cards). The particular suit on the table doesn’t matter – just what kind of card it is. This layout is just a spot for players to put their chips as they bet on which cards the dealer will draw next each round.
The dealer draws one card at first to “burn the card”, which means nothing other than there needs to be only 3 cards in the final hand so this makes the numbers work. Nobody bets on that one.
After that, the dealer draws two cards at a time, the first being the “losing card” and the second “the winning card”. If you’ve got chips on a “losing card”, the dealer takes them. If you’ve got chips on a “winning card”, the dealer pays you out that many chips. The dealer doesn’t place any bets.
The plaque labeled “High Card” is a bet you can make that the second card will be numerically higher than the first card. Again, if you’re right, then the dealer pays you out however much you bet. Dealers can entice you to take advantage of that bet by upping the payout ratio (“High card’s paying out two to one next hand!”)
That abacus device was called a “case keeper”. You slide the beads to keep track of what cards have been drawn so players can know better what’s left in the deck to be drawn. It makes the game much more exciting towards the last few hands as you have better information.
The final hand of three cards is handled differently: players put a penny on the card they bet will be drawn first, then their chips on the card they’re betting will be drawn second (with the third and final card assumed).
Sounds fun. Why don’t people play this anymore?
It appears the house odds aren’t sufficiently in their favor to make this as profitable as poker or some other games. I’ve played it fairly many times now as dealer and can vouch for this – my family broke the bank more than once. Any ties where the dealer draws the same type of card twice go to the house, but that and the probabilities of the game just don’t pay enough, it seems.
And the cheating, which we’ll get to shortly.
So cowboys played this?
Oh yeah, big time! Anybody moving cattle to sell them in the bigger towns and with a little extra money in their pocket couldn’t wait to get as drunk as possible and play Faro. The house knew when to give out free drinks to shift the odds more in their favor, and when to send pretty ladies over as well for more distraction – offering rooms upstairs of course.
You mentioned cheating?
Oh, man was there cheating! Have a look at this book titled Faro Exposed: or The Gambler and His Prey by Alfred Trumble. It was published in 1882 and details the wildest machinations and sleights of hand that dealers would employ to make it all but impossible for players to win. And I heartily recommend this book if you’re at all interested in this game because it’s an incredible read.
The introduction of a mechanical means of dealing called a “dealing box” was supposed to give the gambler a sense that he was dealing with a fair game as it doled out cards one at a time through its apparatus. Supposedly, this took the sleight of hand and manipulations of the dealer out of play, but Trumble walks through multiple chapters worth of how that was also nonsense.
Here’s a funny quote from the book:
“But the reader will ask. Are there no honest gamblers? I answer no. Emphatically no. The sun shines not upon one honest gambler in all this broad land.”
Where did you get the stuff to play?
Here’s where today’s freebies come in! I made everything in Photoshop so it can be printed out on regular 8.5 x 11″ paper and assembled on the table. If you have a card deck, printer, scissors, and tape, you’re good to go. I included poker chips and pennies just for completeness but unless you have a Silhouette Cameo or a lot of patience, you’ll probably just use tokens or coins instead. That’s fine.
I wanted it to look cool and authentic though. The cards came from a Wiki Commons reproduction of 1880’s era cards. The coins too.
There are several pdf’s in the download:
A: The Faro card layout itself in several pages for accuracy on size – print and place per the instructions.
B: The Faro case keeper in 2 pages – just print and assemble per the picture. You’ll use pennies or tokens in place of the abacus beads and just slide them along the dowels in the image.
C: Some tokens to use (if you choose) on the Faro case keeper as well as the Tiger logo
D: Some poker chips and pennies (if you don’t have any handy yourself)
That looks great, thanks! Anything for roleplaying gamers?
Trumble’s extensive descriptions of cheating methods made me wonder if this wouldn’t be a lot of fun in a roleplaying campaign – something quick to drop in to a wild west scenario in the ruleset or storyline of your choice where players could actually play the card game, gamble authentically, and be cheated. The game master could drop clues that cheating was happening, and dice rolls could decide how obvious that is and which authentic cheating methods were occurring.
Here’s what that wound up looking like:
Roll two D6’s to decide the situation from the table, then use Perception rolls (or whatever your ruleset uses for that) to decide whether it’s noticed or not. If it is noticed, then the table offers details on the clues to drop and also the consequences if the player decides to do something about it (first notice only – after that, guns come out!)
Here’s that table in a printable pdf as well if you think that sounds interesting:
If you’d like a high resolution 24″ x 14″ jpg of the Faro table to have a playmat printed (like I did), just click the image below for that. I used Frogigo (link here).
And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope you’re as intrigued as I was – it really is a fun game, and the images of sly dealers and drunk gamblers, the ensuing gunplay, that all was just fuel for my imagination. We played this like crazy over Thanksgiving and Christmas. My dad especially loved it.
Back in October of 2023, we celebrated being at the halfway mark in completing a thrilling new project at Grailrunner. Incredibly, and I can’t believe I’m finally typing this, we’re finished! This puppy is ready to run!
March 1st, 2025, we are launching SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a roleplaying game & supplement aimed at the solo player providing western-themed science fantasy adventures through a bibliomancy oracle.
Who are we?
If you’re new around here, we’re Grailrunner, an indie publisher of science and speculative fiction fiction and games. Our driving passion and special emphasis is on the creative process – innovations in immersive storytelling. Read about that here.
What is the BOOK OF LOTS?
The spirit behind the whole project was to provide the thrill and danger of exploration and adventure inside the cover of a book and to open a fully realized world accessible through the fortune-telling mechanics of bibliomancy.
Contents of this 265 page book include an introduction to a far-future setting (western-themed, so plasma-gauntlet dueling cowboys delving pocket worlds), a simple, streamlined set of rules enabling a player to use no ruleset at all or even dice outside of the book, and a 40,000+ word set of short passages, consulted via bibliomancy to judge outcomes and events, adding story prompt flavor to judgements. Also included are a map and atlas descriptions of locations in the setting, 13 traditional nested oracle tables to further drive events in the story and a detailed index.
How does it work?
We walk you through it in a prologue with a detailed Quick Start example, but the general idea is to use the setting descriptions, the atlas and map, and the oracles tables to build out the skeleton of a character and story following a framework we call the Five Questions. Then, either use the roleplaying game rules of your choice (like D&D or Free League’s Year Zero system) or use the barebones, streamlined rules of this book to start experiencing your story.
Either once per in-game day or as you see fit, consult the lots by holding a specific question in your mind and turning to a random passage on a random page, locating a 1 -3 line passage (called a “lot”) and its number. A question might be “What will I find on the other side of this hill?” or “What happens when I try to climb the walls of these ruins?”
The rules provide for YES/NO answers as well as more sophisticated outcome judgements, but, more importantly, add a layer of story prompt-style chaos and randomness to what happens.
Shoot me a comment here on this article if you’d like to know more or if you’re interested in a review copy.
Since we’re a teensie little indie publisher, it’s super hard to get attention and drum up interest in new products, especially if they’re very different or not related to dungeons. If you’re willing to post something for yourself linking to this announcement, it would be tremendously appreciated!
Every little kind word helps!
*
Anyway, that’s the big announcement. I hope you can feel some of the excitement here on our side. This has been an incredible and life-changing amount of work. It’s nice to start telling people about it.
I lost over thirty years in my art journey because I (stupidly) took a wrong turn based on what should have been great advice. Let me tell you about that, how exactly I went off the rails, and what a ridiculously talented Korean artist said that got me back on the journey.
If you care about the process of visual creation, whether it’s you doing the creating or just a spectator’s interest in how all that works, then this one’s for you.
Why does this matter?
Crap, man, I’d like to be thirty years better in drawing and painting! I hate that I stepped away for that long. I’m the chief illustrator for Grailrunner, and its lead writer, and its game designer. I need to get a lot done myself to control costs, but somehow keep a high standard on quality of art to convey the unique (we think) property we’re trying to build with the Salt Mystic line.
The images below represent the style of work I’m building these days, relying heavily on photobashing and concept art techniques (with folks like Imad Awan as my virtual gurus). The Grailrunner house design standard is semi-realistic digital painting with grungy overlay, western themed adventurers almost always carrying the signature weapon (a gauntlet-based plasma weapon that doubles as a shield in duels), exploring statue-riddled, software-haunted ruins with shimmering dimensional portals. We aim for vibrant or earthy colors, lots of smoke and grit, with implied stories (often illustrating flash fiction on Salt Mystic lore cards).
See the lot of them (and trace my hopefully improving style) at the Artstation account. Yes, I use AI-generated bits to composite exactly like I do with stock images but generally composite everything into something new and paint over them such that the transformation is meaningful and my own.
It gets the job done, at least I think. Still, I wish they were grittier. I wish they broke more new ground than they do. I envy the striking shapes and designs of a lot of concept art out there for cinema and gaming – the kind of images that stick with you even if you don’t know the context. Artstation is great for inspiration, but it can also crush your dreams if you compare yourself to anybody.
What’s prompted this reminiscence about bad art advice?
Well, I came across this book called Sketching From The Imagination: Sci Fi by 3DTotal Publishing. I wrote about it here. That was October, which seems like an eternity ago. I posed for myself the challenge of returning to traditional pencil and ink drawing in a sketchbook to push my imagination harder than ever before. The dream is to explore a blank page with loose shapes and vague ideas to summon phantoms into form and create groundbreaking designs and concepts. Then these wild new beasties and tech and colorful characters would then find homes in the fiction or game settings.
How’s that going?
Meh. I was so much rustier than I thought I was. I’ll share some pages here to embarrass myself and stay accountable to you for improving. We’ll get to that. But let’s talk about that advice.
When I was a kid, I filled scores of sketchbooks and countless backs of trashed dot-matrix printer paper my dad had brought home from work. Drawings of super heroes and sci fi vehicles and cities were my jam. Comic books were my main source of imagery, so everything I was drawing had bold outlines and underwhelming composition. The stories weren’t being told by the images in a self-explanatory way – I didn’t think about that sort of thing. I was alone a lot, so I didn’t share these with anybody, nor did I get any feedback.
Flash forward to one day in art class, Middle School I guess, the teacher strolled by to see whatever I was working on and stopped to say something about my approach that resonated with me. He pointed at the paper and said something profound:
“Real world things don’t have outlines. Draw what you see.”
It shook me. Hadn’t thought about that. Good point. So I gave it everything I had to incorporate his advice into how I drew. Back home, hovering the pencil over the paper, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where or how to make a mark to start the drawing if you couldn’t outline it.
For this post, I looked through some old crates to find a particular drawing that would be humiliating to show but really staked the ground for when I began to turn away from drawing entirely. The picture in my head was a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure party with a lady wizard, a swordsman, and an elf planning their next move on a morning beach with foamy, ripply water lapping at their feet. Maybe a dying campfire in the foreground with smoke rising in front of them. I couldn’t find it, unfortunately.
Anyway, it was horrid. Everything on the page was so light, you couldn’t even make it out. I was petrified to start drawing outlines again, and I couldn’t see how to force shadows and contrast to draw out the shapes. It threw my perspective. It threw my focus on their faces. It ruined everything. It was the last sketchbook I really did anything with until decades later, at least in any serious way.
Sounds bad. What’s different now then?
I get it now. Youtube changes everything, doesn’t it? Contrasting light and dark, the subtle use of textures, faking details, focusing and directing the viewer’s eyes across the image, and strategic use of busy and rest areas…I never went to art school. That all may be common sense to you, but it’s a glorious rainmaker for me to see all that in action artist after artist, listening to these marvelous and generous people draw magnificent things and explain their thought process as they go. Great time to be alive, isn’t it?
I travel a lot, so I keep an art pack and sketchbook. Pigma FB, MB, and BB brush pens, Staedtler pigment liners, a mechanical pencil, and some Graphix watercolor felt pens. Since October, I’ve put the practice time in almost every night at least for a half hour. It wasn’t a pleasant return.
The dream is to draw from imagination though: new things. What I’ve learned from artist after artist in their podcasts, Youtube or ImagineFX interviews is that drawing from reference is far more common. A lot of the guys you see on video drawing or painting have their reference images off screen.
Reference images! That wasn’t why I got into this gig. If I wanted a copy of an image, I’d take a picture. It was disheartening to me to hear professionals talk about light table tracing for their outlines…to see fantasy illustrators mash up references to form fantasy beasts – all of it copying what they saw. That was my problem back in the first place, right?
Then I came across this genius: Kim Jung Gi. Rest in peace.
Please google him if this flame of wonder is unfamilar to you. He drew from his imagination like a magical fountain spews sparkly fairies. He just walked up to paper and went nuts, drawing fish-eyed perspective, highly intricate intertwined figures, scores of objects and novel, distinct, and interesting characters at a high rate of speed and without slowing. How’d he do that?
That guy didn’t have any reference images. That’s what I wanted. I had to go deep to understand what he did right that I was doing wrong that could unlock this magic. Exploration on the blank page…finding ideas haphazardly that were uniquely my own…I wanted to bottle this magic for myself. How in the world did he get to the point he could do it so wonderfully. Then I heard him say it (through a translator):
“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”
His point was you have to do the reference images and understand forms and shapes in three dimensional space before you can do what he did. He explained the lifetime of sitting in public places filling thousands of pages drawing what he saw and forcing himself to draw it from another angle. That was the key – he drew what he saw with a lifetime of practice, but still practiced summoning those images from his memory to try them from different angles.
He drew what he HAD seen. It was a big realization for me, this idea of examining the reference image – not just to get better at copying it, but to run your mind’s eye all over it in three dimensions to understand it better and to file that away to fuel your imagination.
Now THAT’s what artists actually do. They don’t copy. They understand.
I wish that guy was still alive. He was amazing.
Agreed. Now how about sharing your progress?
Ugh. Here you go. Don’t be judgey. Wish me luck that things improve. Go ahead. Click the book.
Ouch. I hope you don’t lose all trust in me, should you have had any. Photobashing is an entirely different beast than battling blank pages with a mechanical pencil. I’ll keep at it. The beast-shaped robotic vehicle in the header image was a minor victory in this experiment: called a “sporecutter”, it’s the first concept that’s come from the new approach that might actually make it to the fiction. Page 15 in the sketchbook file here is the front runner for the design of an important vehicle in the Mazewater: Master of Airships novel I’m working on. That’s another possible win.
That’s what I wanted to talk to you about today. I hope it was enlightening or helpful, should this be a journey you find compelling for yourself. Otherwise, I hope I still brightened your day a bit and made you think.
I really enjoy introducing new elements to the rapidly-exploding Salt Mystic lore. This one is a real joy for a number of reasons, so strap in and hold on! And welcome to the latest entry in the Story Arcade (smash the storyteller below to see all the cards in the collection).
Some context first:
We’re working on a new project for the Salt Mystic line to be called The Augur’s Book of Lots. We celebrated a half-way mark in that recently, which you can read about here. Bottom line: it will be a bibliomancy-style oracle supplement for tabletop roleplaying, meaning it’s a doorway to enter the Salt Mystic world using the rpg game rules of your choice (or none at all).
What this beast of a project requires is a massive amount of lore and concepts that provide danger, intrigue, exotic locations and a rich history to explore, which is exhausting and exhilarating at the same time! Also recently, I personally started getting back into my sketchbook to generate and interact with ideas as an engine to feed the project. You can read the inspiration for that here.
So my head is soup now.
Anyway, one thing I’ve noticed making my way through three volumes of 3DTotal’s marvelous Sketching For The Imagination series is that many artists mine random ideas from inspirations found in nature. Thinking highly of that notion, I found David Attenborough’s Green Planet on Amazon and honestly can’t get enough of it…that and various similar documentaries on Youtube. It’s left me with the sense that I’ve missed an incredibly rich source of ideas – adaptations in nature and the back-and-forth struggle to find food and reproduce in an environment of limited resources. So to convert anything to Salt Mystic concepts, we just crank everything to its max and add some weird science fantasy.
And a gunslinger. Always add a gunslinger.
In the case of today’s highlight, the original inspiration was slime molds. And yes, I get that it’s a bit esoteric, but these things can optimize logistics problems and solve labyrinths! They pulse and locate food sources, at one point in the life cycle growing little stalks (called “fruiting bodies”…eww) to spew spores into the air. That sounds like a marvelous thing to have hapless adventurers come across, as long as it’s as big as a building and uses devious tricks to lure and consume delicious wandering heroes.
The art for this lore card is a photobash of at least five AI-generated elements and, I think, 2 stock images, composited in Photoshop. The core plasmoid and stream came from several iterations of prompts involving “plasmoid”, “giant slime mold”, “forest”, “stream”, etc. I expanded that with Photoshop’s generative fill in all four directions to create the tree canopy and sky, to extend the stream, and to frame the image with trees and rocks. Was also thinking this might go on a Salt Mystic game card at some point, so it needed to be more vertical.
The adventurer was also AI-generated, though he needed quite a bit of cleanup. The silhouette (which makes sense in the text of the lore card) was added with a “color dodge” blend mode with the opacity reduced.
Here’s the final, fuller image – the “Slime Trancer”:
Go take a look at the new lore card for free here. The text is short – won’t take you more than a few minutes to absorb the entire piece (see what I did there?).
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,
Grailrunner Publishing 