Introducing new Lore Cards for the Salt Mystic setting is just awesome for me! Nothing brings the setting to life like a fusion of art and flash fiction, and this new one tied together a lot of things that have been stewing in my head for a while.

It’s called “Companions”.

Download it here, or access all the Salt Mystic Lore Cards for free by smashing the button below:

What is the background?

While writing the original novel that kicked off Grailrunner’s Salt Mystic setting, Tearing Down The Statues, I thought it would be a nice twist to have shaggy white silverback gorillas that gunslinging adventurers rode like horses. When it came time to actually introduce the concept though, on a whim, I wound up explaining that these wonderful beasts at one time, centuries ago, could speak. It always seemed a sad thought and something I’d maybe return to explore one day. I haven’t really dug that well yet, but maybe today’s scene scratches at that dirt.

So what’s happening in the story here then?

Why not read it? Just takes a couple of minutes. But just to give the flavor, the beast and rider are in the frozen wilds looking for an abandoned oriel gate to a lost pocket of artificial space where surely treasures and marvels lay forgotten. That isn’t the story though, as the title suggests.

How did the art come about?

I generated the base piece with AI, using variations of prompts relating to “shaggy white silverback” and “gunfighter explorer”. It was a low res square image but had the general layout I wanted. I corrected the snowy rock they’re standing on and removed some weird noise on the image, as well as another person standing there in a completely different scale.

The rider’s head was terrible, so I replaced it (after five tries) with another one, also generated in AI. That was tricky and had to be color graded and tweaked to fit.

Then I added the snow with an overlay in Screen blending mode. I just grabbed it off the internet (googling “snow overlay”). It was my first time making a snowy scene though, and I definitely learned the importance of scale for the snowflakes. My first few attempts looked like a blizzardy mess, but I laid a bunch of copies of the overlay down, tiling them across the image so the flakes would be smaller (and lowered their opacity, which was the real trick with this!).

Then, magic happened.

When I went into Illustrator to build the Lore Card itself, dropping the square image in didn’t look very impressive. With the previous Lore Card, I’d tried dropping the text directly onto the image for a magazine-look and thought I’d give it a go again with this one.

I needed a longer vertical image, with a dark, snowy rock in shadow at the bottom for white text.

Look at what Photoshop’s new “generative expand” feature did!

Sheesh, guys! What a time to be alive. Photoshop is incredible.

Anyway, I hope you take a look at the new card and that you enjoy it. Thanks for your time today. Have a great week.