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.
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.
It’s been a month since we published SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a solo roleplaying game based on our multi-media Salt Mystic setting. There are some bright spots, some hopeful notes, and a world of pain. Overall, we’re still incredibly proud of the product and seeing and hearing people appreciate it in the wild is an experience like nothing else!
We thought it would be helpful for anybody thinking of putting your own book out to see what we tried: what worked, and what didn’t…and what still might. Care to come along?
Way back in 2016, I wrote a short article defining some indie publishing principles based on lessons from the launch of my first book: TEARING DOWN THE STATUES. The principles were consolidated into the acronym “MCGRAW”, suggesting the key elements necessary for publishing success (Mainstream recognition, an eye-catching Cover that looks like it belongs with books like it, a popular Genre, as many Reviews on major listing sites as possible, Awards to add validation that the book merits attention, and Word of Mouth.) We kept these in mind this launch and tried to incorporate what we could, although the genre of tabletop roleplaying is so saturated and so dominated by Dungeons & Dragons that we were working uphill and digging holes from the beginning.
Still, hope springs eternal, and this is a product we believe in mightily, knowing from its ideation that nobody else was doing anything like it.
What was the pre-launch like?
February was a hot mess, finalizing the proofs and shaking trees to try and get attention from bloggers and gaming news sites. Short of providing free pizza delivered by cosplayers who do magic tricks, I’m not sure what else we could have done to get mentions from some of these guys – we reached out to 20 and got one “No, Thanks” and absolute crickets otherwise. That’s offering a free physical copy for review, by the way. Local gaming store wasn’t interested, and I didn’t have the heart to cold call others. My ego can only take so much bruising!
I pushed my Photoshop skills to the breaking point generating ad assets to use in social media and ad campaigns, stirring up some images that I think really popped! Here’s my favorite, though we had to switch it out to juice the click rate after things got rolling.
I’m a big fan of Absolute’s 3d cover generator and Envato’s PlaceIt – both to generate mock up’s of the cover in various places. We generated this one below for banners through RPG Geek and some other sites:
We came SOOOO close to hiring an artist we’ve been targeting for years now, and he might yet come on board for a promotional poster, so I won’t jinx anything by saying more. That would be amazing, so wish us luck! Anyway, he was swamped with other things, so the heavy lifting on graphics was still in-house.
How did you handle distribution setup?
The book is available at booksellers globally through Ingram Spark, and also on Amazon thru Kindle Direct Publishing, as well as the pdf on Drivethru RPG. We got the barcode direct from Bowker to retain full distribution rights – there are strings attached to the freebies. Honestly, setup was fairly painless for Kindle Direct, but I thought at one point Ingram was going to leave me with facial tics!
The cover file was a high res jpg I’d built in Adobe Illustrator, and it included some transparent png images (the title and the Grailrunner logo). The art was done with Daz Studio for the figures, some Blender and Photoshop filters for the forearm weapons, and some AI help for the background, everything composited and color graded in Photoshop then dropped into Illustrator for the text and placements. This is what that looks like, front and back:
Weird white outlines were appearing in the digital proof around anything that was a png in the image. Maddening! Nobody at Ingram Customer Service was responding, and internet advice was kind of all over the place. I tried various export presets and never resolved it, at last approving the digital proof even with the outlines in hopes that it was in fact a screen artifact only (as some advice suggested). Thankfully, the issue didn’t show up in the physical version.
As for offering a physical version through Drivethru RPG, I basically gave up. They seem to be saying they use the same print house as Ingram, though a different division or something? I dunno. Anyway, much worse issues with anything that was a png, including the interior art! A true disaster! I’m sure they would say it’s my fault, but I bailed entirely and just offer the digital version through them. My blood pressure thanked me immediately!
How did you advertise?
We ran campaigns on Facebook, through Google, Amazon, and on RPG Geek. The book is also listed this month on Ingram’s home page and in the World Reader, iCurate Connection, and Indiewire newsletters, all via Ingram (~28,000 circulation for the newsletters). Through the Independent Book Publishers Association, the book will be represented at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia this June. We’ll see how all that works out, but here are some initial experiences:
Meta (Facebook) started at 2.1% click rates with tens of thousands of impressions as well as loads of shares and likes and bookmarks. It all felt great until we saw that precious little of that was converting to sales. Internet research was suggesting a good click rate was 2% for search ads and 0.1% for display ads like banners, but for us it was just a lot of activity with poor conversions. By changing the graphics out to a grinning gunslinger and tweaking the copy a bit, we doubled the click rate to 4.2%. We’ll see if all those bookmarks and shares pay off down the line!
GoogleAds was impressive, as their algorithm learns as you go, tweaking things to improve the reach. We wound up with a 5.1% click rate by the campaign’s end, which we view as solid. We even had one day peak at the end at 8.1%! All campaigns led to the same Amazon listing, so we can’t separate sales by campaign but I thought a lot of this experience overall.
RPG Geek was a little disappointing. Multiple banner and display ads dominated the site for a month. The thinking here was that this site entirely specializes in roleplaying games, so you couldn’t find a more on-the-nose target audience! Still, click rates flatlined at 0.1% for two weeks, till the same changes as above doubled that to a paltry 0.18% by campaign end.
Amazon: We only launched the Amazon ads in the last week or so – it’s a little early to report any results. I’d also never added any A+ content to a listing before, so that was new. Of course, I added that gunslinger since he seems to catch eyeballs, along with a very short description of the book.
So, was it a good launch?
Could have done more on pre-launch to get some mentions, honestly. We need to work on a solid email list and social media following though the new content required for that is a bit threatening when everyone has day jobs. Reviews remain super difficult to get, though some favorables have popped up that we didn’t arrange. Overall, sales are ramping up very slowly. Glacially, you might say.
What’s next?
I submitted SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for consideration in the 2025 Ennie Awards, which is the Super Bowl of RPG’s! Any mentions at all would be high octane fuel for me. That’s a long shot, of course, just because of the ridiculous amount of talent in the field these days. Still, you never know…
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I hope some of this was helpful or at least entertaining. Warts and all, this is how things have gone so far and the plan going forward. I’m sure the outside observer can find all manner of beasties and stinking swamps herein, but from the inside, it’s a wild, crazy bucking bronco we’re just happy to hold onto!
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!
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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.
For some roleplaying gamers, the thrill of the game comes from cautious, dangerous exploration of the unknown with a hissing, hungry beast potentially down every corridor. For some, it’s the “beer and pizza” comradery and casino-like feel of the dice deciding life and death. Many love the unfolding stories, to gather “there I was” anecdotes like they’re candy.
But some of us want some blood and consequences.
Youtube is crammed with advice on how to make your tabletop RPG combat more realistic, but there’s a fellow you’re going to meet here who may have cracked that code with a rocketship of a game from the turn of the millennium called The Riddle of Steel.
So you should know…Jake studied and taught at a leading historical martial arts organization, was co-founder of the Historical European Martial Arts Alliance, and held championship and rank positions in multiple disciplines including the number one position in the United States for the longsword. He’s not just some nerd cranking out dice mechanics, though when we spoke, he shocked me with his depth of RPG knowledge and passion. He’d even heard of Feng Shui Action Movie Roleplaying, which that alone would have made him awesome.
Here he is. Watch this and try not to grin at this guy.
Anyway, today he might be head of the European cybersecurity business for a global consulting firm and a Ted Talk waiting to happen, but why brag about that when you created something many consider as the most realistic simulation of combat in a tabletop game? I sat down with Jake in December to talk about everything from The Witcher to D&D, from the reality of trying to stab someone with a sword to being front-row at some legendary developments in roleplaying games. Our chat was a fascinating tornado of influences and inspirations, and, sadly, I can only present here the heaviest-hitting topics and exchanges to keep the size manageable (puns intended). I hope you enjoy hearing from him as much as I enjoyed our conversation.
As always, my main interest in hearing from Jake was to understand his inspirations and influences, what drove him to create something in the first place and from what wells he may have drawn as he did so. Before we get into any of that or in any details here, let me hook you a bit on what innovations and experimentation made Riddle of Steel unique.
Riddle of Steel Overview
The game itself (Driftwood Publishing 2001) is a D10 dice pool system, meaning you’re trying to accumulate as many 10-sided dice as you can for various rolls to see whether you get the outcome you want as the story plays out. The setting is a massive continent on a roughly earth-sized world (both named Weyrth) and replicates many familar low fantasy sword & sorcery elements. – though with plenty of room for vicious, deadly combat. And that’s where the system really shines.
Spiritual Attributes: Like many systems, characters receive stats based on their backstory and natures to affect dice rolls. Here, these include Strength, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, and Health as well as Will Power, Wit, Mental Aptitude, Social, and Perception. However, this ruleset also provides for Spiritual Attributes such as Conscience, Destiny, Drive, Faith, Luck and Passion: traits derived from your character’s backstory and which can change over the course of the game. They have mechanical consequences for gameplay but also have a magical way of driving roleplaying and heightening dramatic moments.
Combat Initiative: Commonly, the turn order of combat moves in a roleplaying game is determined by an Initiative dice roll. In Riddle of Steel, opposing players (or the game master rolling for a non-player character) declare a fighting stance up front which can provide stronger attacks and defenses at the cost of predictability and flexibility. Players then simultaneously uncover either a RED or a WHITE die to either ATTACK or WAIT. Imagine two boxers eyeing each other amid their footwork to gauge the next move and size up their options.
Terrain: The ruleset encourages description of and integration with the environment in which the combat is taking place. In fact, page 77 offers Target Numbers to roll against so that things like swampy ground or tight spaces affect gameplay. To me, this opens up all kinds of interesting twists in a fight given the props and surrounding conditions either fighter might take advantage of.
Hit Location Zones: When you make your attack, it isn’t blindly at the opponent so much as an attempt to strike a specific target. It’s part of the attack. Looks like this:
Detailed Damage Tables: I understand this is one of the areas for which the Riddle of Steel ruleset was often criticized as being too clunky and slowing down the game. My take is a bit different though. There are tables here for Cutting, Puncture, and Bludgeoning damage for each Hit Location Zone. Just have them handy and printed separately, man. Doesn’t take long to find what happened And it brings a gruesome and fierce edge to the fight. Honestly, combat doesn’t take longer than a turn or two in this game anyway.
That’s right. You can die in combat in Riddle of Steel. Fast.
Let’s Hear From The Designer!
Jake, What were some of your earliest influences and inspirations? [The actual conversation has been paraphrased and edited for flow and space considerations.]
“I started with D&DSecond Edition, kind of a blend of 2nd and 1st Edition because I came in on the cusp between the two. At some point, I also played Shadowrun, and played a pretty healthy amount of Warhammer Fantasy roleplay, which was my favorite of the lot. And fictional inspirations too. I’d read some great novel that I wanted to play in a game. I would look at which of the games that I played would be easiest to hack or home brew.
“I bought a D30 once in a game store as a novelty. What the hell do you use that for, right? So Marvel Studios back in the early 90’s in the heyday of Jim Lee and the New X-men rebranding, they published these cards. You know, collector cards of all the Marvel X-men superheroes with stats on the back. So I used my D30 and those stats to write my first ever coherent roleplaying game. I don’t know. I was, maybe 12 or 13. Then at one point in high school, the whole World of Darkness thing got really huge. So I played some Vampire, some Werewolf, and some of those other spinoff games. And GURPS, this idea of modularity and all that. These were all heavy, heavy points of inspiration for me.”
And The Witcher books?
“Right. I spent a couple of years living and working in Poland and learned to speak Polish. I started reading them before the last one was published. I read Sapkowski’s works while I was in Poland, in Polish, and I was just so energized by them! I thought they just captured my imagination in a huge way! When I got back to the U.S. in late 1999, early 2000, I wanted to play The Witcher. I wanted to do something that had this vibe of really cool combat, right? I wanted to do something where the players are making choices about what the character is doing in the fight. I didn’t want to just say ‘you roll, you hit, you roll, you don’t hit, I attack’ – you know. I wanted some degree of tangible, tactical interaction.
“And around that same time, I was introduced to King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford, which is a master class in game design. One of the greatest games ever designed, hard stop. Just phenomenal.
“Fun little side note on that: shortly before Greg died, a common friend of ours introduced us. I consulted on some of the combat rules for what Greg was planning for 6th edition. I signed an NDA – all that stuff, actually sat down with them at Gen Con. I walked him through a whole bunch of armor research…how it really functions and how it’s really fought in. All these things and then…God save us all…he died. I have no idea if any of that made it into the notes for the guy who actually finished 6th edition. My guess is it didn’t, which just kills me because Pendragon is such an incredible game. To have had my name listed as advisor for Pendragon would have been like a crowning nerd achievement. Anyway, Pendragon. Phenomenal!”
Any others?
“Yeah, I was introduced to a Polish game called Dzikie Pola, which means The Wild Fields. It’s the Polish name for eastern Poland, the Ukraine, during the kind of Baroque period – the Polish golden age when it was sabers and Sarmatians and big furry hats. It’s an amazing period, and there is some amazing fiction and historical stuff out there about it! Anyway, it had this really clever dueling system for sabers, and it was the first time I’d seen this kind of approach where you have a number of combat points – like you’ve got 10, the other guy, 8 or whatever. You pick from a list of maneuvers that cost points. Then you contest back and forth. The game’s second edition took all that stuff out though. I don’t know how functional it all was, but the idea was brilliant!
And John Wick was starting to publish his big games: 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings. John Wick was kind of the rock star of game designers. He’d won the Origins Award for best game two or three years in a row. I was reading some of his games and looking at his tech, the vibe there. But I tried hacking GURPS. I tried hacking Warhammer Fantasy. I just ultimately decided that I couldn’t hack any of these games to be what I wanted.”
So we’re getting into game design choices for Riddle of Steel, then?
“Yeah. I know from playing Shadowrun that it was fun to roll a handful of dice, right? I knew from playing World of Darkness that I hated when you rolled and hit, then rolled for damage and didn’t do anything. I hated that these things needed to be connected. There was no point in even trying to hack D&D at that point. They’d gone to edition 3.5 and I was like, ‘what are feats’? I definitely went through at least a decade, maybe 15 years, when I was “too cool” for D&D. So I started looking at it as a blank slate with some requirements: I needed you to make combat choices all the time you’re in a fight, choices that had to be meaningful. They have to be impactful and interesting enough that the rest of the table wants to watch.
“There were just things happening in these other games that I was playing that were taking me out of the fiction. There had to be a sense of risk, a sense of danger to promote making certain kinds of decisions. I wanted something exciting to watch, with real decisions that had enough flexibility so you could insert some flash into it. I kind of failed at that, to be honest, but it was a major goal in the game design then.”
Flash. Tell me about that.
“I wanted a system where you could create the kind of things that show up in the Witcher books. Geralt fights in a very flashy way. The word ‘pirouette’ shows up a lot, at least in the Polish. He cut a guy in a pirouette: a somersault and a pirouette. And the guy’s head popped off. I wanted a system where you could plug that kind of stuff in.
I started doing research and realized I needed to know more…not just about games. And I started looking at how weapons were used historically and stumbled across what would later be called the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) movement. It blew my face off! It honestly replaced roleplaying games as the primary obsession of my life for the next 20 years. As I researched, I realized how little we knew as a community about the martial arts of the period. Everything I found out, everything I could glean and pull from that made its way into Riddle of Steel. So I stopped worrying about some of the more cinematic, flashy stuff and started thinking about what happened historically…how do I model that in my game? I got an endorsement from a leading historical martial arts organization at the time because I showed them what I was doing. And listen, man, if you’re trying to recreate a historical martial art, you’re a nerd.”
Let’s talk about the art in the book.
“Yeah. The main three artists in the book are myself, a guy named Rick McCann (who also helped design the original sorcery system), and Ben Moore. My high school buddies, right? I was in the art scene, and they were my artist friends. Rick was by far the more professional artist of us. I think he’s a professional artist today.” [Editor’s note – Rick has in fact taught artists at Dreamworks Animation among other places and is indeed available for contracted art]
I’ve got to ask about this one particular image in there. This guy.
“Yeah. That’s Rick. Rick McCann. Rick was really, really good. Rick did the cover.”
“All the knotwork was done by Ben Moore. All the very clean black and white inked pieces were me, and some of the pencil pieces. And one of the criticisms I got early on like when we first went to GAMA Expo was there was too much art, that I should have used less art and avoided a lot of the lower quality pieces. I guess that’s true. I don’t know. It’s worth pointing out: I just wanted a game for me and my friends to play. I had no intention of publishing. And then I wanted a physical copy because, you know, pdf’s weren’t a thing yet. To get something affordable, I had to print hundreds of copies and so – well crap – if I’m going to print hundreds of copies, I’ve got to sell 299 of them. And so it spiraled like that.”
Fantastic. Just fantastic. Talk about those early days then, as you guys were putting this together.
“I was going to university. Rick and Ben were in art school. I wrote the entire first draft of everything and showed it to these guys. They had some ideas and added to it, then the first large-scale play test of the game was with my old high school D&D group. I went back to visit them. One of the guys in the group – his grandparents ran a doughnut shop. We’d go there in the afternoons after it closed, and we played a whole five-session campaign over a summer week. I was trying to see if my ideas were even going to work at all.
“You look for trends and patterns, what seems to be working. And I went back and designed again. Then the version we originally published, 300 copies, that’s the one we took to the GAMA trade show and to Origins. And when that sold out, we needed another printing, and I found a printer in China or wherever that was affordable, with higher quality print and clearer images.
“It was interesting. Going from the fun part of designing the game and creating this work of art, building it in Pagemaker, putting in the text, picking fonts and graphics, play testing, publishing at the first couple of cons where you’re promoting the game…and there’s so much excitement and energy till you realize you’ve now borrowed more money than you’ve ever had in your life. You’re trying to make this happen, and suddenly it’s a business you’re trying to make money with. And the fun of using it for tax writeoffs becomes not so much fun anymore.”
And you wound up selling it?
“Yes, I sold Driftwood Publishing in 2004, and the rights went to someone else, who then sold it in 2013 to Tavish Campbell of Red Lion Publishing. I haven’t been in contact with Tavish in a decade, and I wonder if he’s not dead!” [Editor’s note: we tried contacting Tavish for this article. We really did. If any of you can help reach him, Jake would like to catch up!]
“But I learned a lot as a designer. As I write a successor game, whatever it winds up being called, I’ve got great stuff. In the event that I ever get around to finishing and publishing it, I understand my priorities as a designer so much better now because I have words that describe things that I simply felt as a 22 year old.”
You said European Martial Arts blew your face off. Give me one concrete example of what you meant by that.
“I think the first thing was – I saw this video of a guy doing what we call a flourish, just swinging the sword around shadow-boxing with an early rapier, something you could cut with. The blade was moving so fast, and it was so lethal-looking. The economy of movement! Up until that point, every time I’d seen somebody wielding a sword, it was an actor performing staged choreography that came from either modern sport fencing or from traditional stage combat (which is meant to be inefficient and safe by design). If you look at the sword fighting even in some of the better films like Lord of the Rings, you can see they’re intentionally swinging at each other’s swords and not at each other. So I saw this guy who was not a stage fencer, moving his weapon in a way that was like – Oh my God, this is fast! It looks lethal. It looks beautiful.
“And the second thing that blew my face off was realizing there are hundreds of books written during that time period that tell you how to use these instruments. The whole HEMA movement was about taking a martial artist and a historical book and slamming these things together. We were actually experimenting to recreate lost arts by taking people who knew how to move and getting them to try and interpret these historical sources and make that come to life.”
If somebody’s reading this and wants to get their hands on a book like that, name a good one.
“There’s a website called The Wiktenauer that contains dozens if not hundreds of these manuscripts. Translated photocopies. All kinds of stuff. My stupid claim to fame is that I named it. I had nothing else to do with its creation. It’s a play on wiki and then the master, Johannes Lichtenauer.”
How does The Burning Wheel RPG fit into all this?
“Luke Crane and I became friends actually. The Burning Wheel and Riddle of Steel approached the same problems in different ways. We had very similar design priorities, and so when we first met each other in 2002 or 2003, we were definitely looking at each other crazy, like, whoa – hold on, are you like a competitor? Are you an enemy? And a year later we were very close friends, and he is still one of my closest friends to this day. I spent many years going to Gen Con as a member of Burning Wheel HQ crew, just quietly being this guy who also wrote this other game.”
All right. It’s time. Let’s have some advice from the designer of Riddle of Steel on how to fight in the game. What do I need to know?
“Dump as many stats as you can to get a high reflex score. The higher the combat pool, the better. The name of the game is not to land a hit; it’s to drain the other guy’s pool and then land a hit. Once you land a hit, press your advantage. But focus on not getting hit first. Pressing and gaining the initiative. If you gain the initiative, keep it. If you throw a WHITE die and your opponent throws a RED, and he comes at you with a small number of dice, parry with slightly more than he did. If you parry with too much, he’ll use the feint.
“The odds are in your favor if he attacks with a lot of dice. Use the counter maneuver when you attack. If you think you’ve got a chance to go for the jugular, go high and throw a lot of dice into it. But if you think he’s going to counter that, you’ll get killed. So get to know your opponent. If he uses a lot more defense dice, then call a feint.”
Jake, you’ve been amazing! Thanks for your time here.
“Yeah, by all means! As you can see, I’m happy to talk about all this stuff. I still enjoy it. Thanks for spending time to hear me rant.”
*
For Grailrunner readers, it may be expensive or at times impossible to find a copy of Riddle of Steel out there in the wild right now. Here’s a link to a Quick Start Guide from Driftwood Publishing by Stephen Barringer that’s publicly available for free.
Hopefully you enjoyed our chat. For me, it was an absolute blast! I’ll leave you with the opening words from Riddle of Steel:
Since the dawning of time, when Triumph the Forger-God pounded out the world from the mists and ores of heaven, mean have sought the Riddle of Steel.
Few have found it.
What is it?
It is invincibility – to strike with all and to be struck by none.
It is understanding – to ask questions and to know the answers.
It is peace – to walk without fear, to know that the end is in your own hands.
It is skill – to feel the elegance found in violence, and to know the beauty found in stillness.
It is Spirit – to gaze into the face of your God and to know him before he comes for you.
I’m swimming with stuff I need to get down in the lore for the Salt Mystic universe. There should be more time in the day and less need to pay bills.
Anyway, here’s the background if you aren’t familiar with the original IP we’re building here at Grailrunner called Salt Mystic.
A unique blend of western grit and fantastical science! Step into a far future world where artificial pocket dimensions hide untold mysteries, gunslingers duel with ball lightning, and colossal armies fight for their very survival. Get ready to embark on a boneshaking adventure that will test your courage and set fire to your imagination!
Salt Mystic is an immersive experience that seamlessly weaves together the rugged allure of a wild western tale but with the boundless wonders of science fantasy.
Today, we’re introducing a new threat to this rapidly growing world called the Justice Engine, and we’re doing it with an exciting new lore card, available for download free now!
What is a Salt Mystic lore card?
Smash the Story Arcade button below to see a description and to access all of them, but basically it’s a distinct fusion of art and flash fiction on a single page to build (brick by brick) this expansive new world.
Oh, Grailrunner, what have you done now?
Oh, today’s a whopper! A doozie. A slam-fest to your noggin. It started with the art this time, and the vague idea of a wandering mechanical judge with a dimensional gate in its chest. You can see some of the image in the header and the full image below, though if you’re at all interested, why not just take a peek at the pdf in the Story Arcade?
The art is a photobash paintover, with the golem body itself AI-generated. I altered the background, mainly the tower on the right, and corrected some artifacts that came with it as well as added some clouds and sky. Then I added the rocky ground in the foreground to heighten the image for the card. The dimensional gate swirling was a handful of sparkly and lightning overlays in Color Dodge mode. The idea here is this thingie can just pluck you up and drop you into a pocket dimension should you be found guilty.
But it isn’t Robocop. I didn’t want some Hollywood-style robot going rogue with its own ideas of justice in a dystopian nightmare. There’s a twist to who’s doing the thinking with these and why they’re qualified to do so. There’s a reason they’re wandering these days, and it’s sad but maybe a little hopeful.
And all that is tied distinctly to the history of the Salt Mystic setting. I’m personally really proud of this one in particular, and I can’t wait to write it into something more ambitious.
Please take a peek at the lore card – shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two to read the text and get the flavor of this new beastie. And let me know what 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 