science fantasy

Announcement: the Salt Mystic card game is live with refreshed art and repackaged as a starter set!!

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We said we’d let you know when the proofs were right. Well, the proofs are right. The refreshed Salt Mystic Starter Set is live!

If you’ve been following along, you’ve already heard me confess to some questionable decisions about the old card art. Turns out learning a new trick in Blender and needing that trick on a game card are two entirely different things. It took me an embarrassingly long time to sort that out.

The new art had a better question to answer. What would make you pick up one of these cards and want to know where that gunslinger came from, or what happened in the patch of ruins they’re fighting over?

So what’s in the box?

We’ve repackaged the game into a single 72-card Starter Set featuring Karak: The Hammer of the Red Witch and his Mountains faction versus Segmond: The Loreblade and his wily Salt Flats faction.

Karak’s Mountains deck and Segmond’s Salt Flats deck are both in there, along with terrain, measuring cards, and player aids. The Start Here card has a QR code for the refreshed rules, and First Clash walks you through your first fight.

If you’re new around here, Salt Mystic is a science-fantasy skirmish game where you move the cards around the table. Turn a gunslinger to face a threat. Tuck them behind a rock outcropping. Get cocky about how far away the other guy is and find out exactly what a ball lightning carbine can do.

Where can I learn more?

Learn about it
Read the rules
Buy a copy

By the way, we’re celebrating all this by way of a very special reunion with an old friend.

Oh yeah, who’s that?

Brian here. One of my personal favorite characters in all of the Salt Mystic universe is a volatile powder-keg fellow named Cyprian. The image of him has been with me since the original novel, Tearing Down the Statues: the thing that started all of this. Unnaturally tall, in a long leather coat with heavily tattooed hands in red & black, and with the illusion of flames erupting from black shoulderboards, he’s unpredictable and deadly with the signature weapon in Salt Mystic: the ball lightning carbine.

I thought it would be awesome to 3d print him.

Ooh, is there a model?

There’s something funny about spending all this time getting plasma gunslingers to look right on flat pieces of cardboard and then turning around to see if I can get one of the first people in this world to stand up on the desk. I’ve known Cyprian a long time. I want to see how that coat looks when I can turn him around in my hand.

I uploaded the text of Tearing Down the Statues to the Pro version of ChatGPT and asked for a better illustration than I would be able to come up with. It took a few passes to get it right but when it finally landed, I was very, very impressed! You can see the tattered, weathered coat, the carbine shield, that deadly ballistic knife he carries, and those amazing shoulder boards. Very cool.

Then I converted that illustration to a new image appropriate to load to Meshy AI: a separate AI tool which generates 3d models from images. I had it add a base, remove the color, and emphasize some geometry better so Meshy would pick up on it. Then I took that to Meshy and got the STL file.

It took me forever, back in ChatGPT, to close some shell holes and fix some errors Meshy left procedurally. Then I spent forever in Chitubox trying to get the supports right. I never did successfully address some internal cavities but the supports wound up great. I’m not a 3d modeler, man. Not at all. And I don’t have the patience to find all those overhangs and fix them one by one. So I just printed it and hoped for the best.

I’ll be honest, when I scraped that thing off the printer plate for the first time and saw that guy there in my hand, a character who existed only in my ghostly imagination for over a decade, I got emotional.

It was really great to actually meet him.

I uploaded the pic of the printed model and had AI generate the paint scheme, which is portrayed here. I didn’t paint that, thought I’d love to pass that off as my handiwork. I wish I could tell you my paint job was that awesome. Unfortunately, no.

But anyway, I liked what I saw and read off all my acrylic paint colors from old sets I had lying around and some Privateer Press colors. Plus, I bought some metallic paints from Amazon back in the day which always turned out well. That way, ChatGPT knew what specific colors to use in its step-by-step painting instructions. Very prescriptive and helpful.

And nuln oil. I love nuln oil. It forgives all sins in bad paint jobs by making shadows in crevices. I totally need that sort of magic in painting models.

And there’s my guy. Cyprian. In my hand, pointing his gun at me from my bookshelf.

Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to you and you can’t relate to why I’d be excited. But I hope that’s not the case. Fifteen years ago, I wracked my brain to come up with a cool aesthetic for this guy. I remembered Firestorm from the old DC comics and his flaming head illusion. I remembered old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies. I gave him a scar on his face just to give him a history and thought bright red & black tattoos on his hands would be unique.

It was me trying to dream up a fascinating character and summon imagery without being able to really see the guy.

And here he is.

Anyway, your takeaway should be that the Salt Mystic game is renewed and repackaged for easier entry to this world and you should check it out.

Your second takeaway is this author guy wrote a book with a character important to him and through modern wizardry is holding an accurate model of him in his hand. If we had flying cars, I’d truly agree we’re living in the future. I thought I’d share one of my favorite scenes from the book with this guy, Cyprian Talgo, to give you some context so the celebration makes sense. He’s in a corridor in an undersea complex surrounded by four gunfighters who’ve made the mistake of telling him they’d like to see what he can do with that weapon.

Click the arrow to expand the scene.

“You want to see something amazing?”

“Did I upset you, lapdog?” Cyprian’s voice was soft.

“You can’t just threaten them like that. Jeopardizes the whole structure we’ve got here. You brought it on yourself, honestly. And I’ve got a lot of anticipation here; because I was just going to have someone put a slug in your forehead on the ship. A couple of the guys thought better of it to see what you could do.”

“Risky.”

“I don’t know about that. Fascinating though. Nobody’s going to start a war over you…the world isn’t like that anymore, Talgo.”

“Less chatter!” The guy behind Cyprian spat this out.

“You want to see something amazing?” Cyprian’s grin was sinister. Thrilled.

Another of those surrounding Cyprian, the one with a burn on his cheek, smiled wickedly, “Whatever. Rich boy.”

The young Talgo watched the face of the one who’d last spoken, the one excitedly awaiting a show full of drama and color, swirling action and a thrilling recount for his friends. He did the same for some of the others and saw the same eagerness, a boyish delight in a playground brawl with the biggest kid in school. He had clearly seen this before and was maybe surprised at how alike these sorts of people are.

“I know your tricks, jay bird.” A darker man to Cyprian’s side spoke, one with an eye squinting more than the other. “Two breakers in your carbine – fires twice as fast. You prance around like a dancing idiot while we panic and try not to shoot each other because you’re you. They write books about you.”

Ventrey had been watching the olive man who’d spoken, then at last turned back to Cyprian, “Give me back my gun.”

Cyprian kept silent. He turned his eyes to each of the men about him, waiting on one of them to do something other than threaten. Impatiently, he raised his eyebrow and gently shook his head as if to signal ‘well, I’m waiting’. Perhaps they were only blustering. At any rate, when he moved, it was with ferocity.

Like a crocodile attacking, Cyprian leaned in and thrust his right heel behind him, crunching backwards the knee of the man approaching him there. The fellow quickly went down grunting like an animal and collapsing around that knee. Before he had even fallen, Cyprian had shifted his carbine to his forearm and slung a ball of lightning through the falling man’s forehead exploding it in charred and smoking fragments.

Smoothly as if he’d seen their return fire in slow motion or on game film beforehand, Cyprian twisted the insulated shield of his carbine through the air blocking their shots in sequence. He spun a full circle throwing his carbine arm out to smash Ventrey’s jaw with the barrel, drawing out a tooth and fired multiple precise shots off, throwing the others into defensive moves shielding themselves. Lightning popped and rushed around them and hissed as balls popped out of existence in searing flames.

— Tearing Down the Statues, Chapter 4

*

That’s what I wanted to share with you today. I’d be highly honored if you checked out the new game and let us know what you think. It’s been years of work culminating in something everyone involved with Grailrunner is very proud of.

Till next time,

Building an indie game’s meta-story one gunslinger at a time

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If this is your first time visiting Grailrunner, we make games, art, and fiction mostly set in our signature IP, a western-themed science fantasy roller coaster called Salt Mystic. In 2021, we published a tabletop skirmish game with the curious notion of telling stories with it.

Our original manifesto for the game included these three guiding principles:

  • Make the characters come alive. Combine gorgeous card artwork with gameplay mechanics that reflect who the characters are and why their stories matter.
  • Give the battles a bigger story. Create an overarching narrative that explains who’s fighting, why, and what the consequences might be whichever side wins.
  • Give everything a history. Every character, weapon, and vehicle has a backstory. Even the scratches on a cannon barrel came from somewhere.

We’re talking 8, maybe 10 years ago when I first really started thinking through how to do all that. And the first real in-game story came about in September of 2019. I wrote about that in an update on game development here. It was these guys:

Who are those two?

In the Salt Mystic lore, there are stories able to travel and affect the world on their own, hopping from mind to mind and even possessing people. Some are able to raise a guardian for that generation, uniquely suited with the character and charisma to change the world. Helion and Stratica were brothers living in an old shack as boys shivering on a winter evening when a mysterious hag visited their door, offering that one of them would be this generation’s guardian.

Only one of them.

I remember chuckling at how ridiculous it was to have a game mechanic where if the players put these two cards onto the table at the same time it plays havoc with the rules and starts a timer that just trashes the entire game if you don’t force these two to confront each other. I still love that, having a meta-story hovering over the game and over the background narrative.

There have been others but it struck me recently as I was refreshing the artwork for the game that there’s another meta-story building on its own that made me want to write this post.

Really? What’s that?

This card here represents one of my favorite characters in the Salt Mystic setting. I have a long history with her and have struggled mightily to refine the artwork over the years to match the picture in my head.

She calls herself The Wake.

With virtually every cityscape and terrain saturated with sensors and computing power, there is a ubiquitous internet called the Datastream where someone who knows how to use it can see and hear almost anything anywhere. She mastered it like no one else and brings incredible battlefield knowledge. Her game mechanic forces the opposing player to reveal cards at crucial moments.

What’s funny is how she came to be in my mind though. There was this girl on a plane in Oakland.

Are you being creepy?

No, but hear me out. This goes back to maybe 2016 or so. I was sitting on a plane waiting for everyone else to board. I noticed this lady standing at her seat as folks jostled by, 3 or 4 seats ahead of me. She was wearing a thin cotton blouse and a loose cotton pants, with part of a red dragon tattoo visible on the back of her neck. I saw the bottom of the tattoo on her lower back and the shade of it even through her blouse. Jet black hair and this audacious, stunning tattoo.

If Grailrunner teaches you nothing else, please remember what Thomas Edison said, “To invent, all you need is an imagination and a pile of junk.” I filed her away and came back to her years later when I needed an interesting look for a new character. That tattoo extending across a pretty woman’s entire torso struck me as a great idea.

Here’s ten years of trying to make her look like I thought she should:

I told you a couple of weeks ago about my unfortunate addiction to Blender‘s 3d software at the time of all this. These original versions started in Daz Studio, with some hair and kitbashed clothing I’d picked up. I built the weapon in Blender out of a squashed cylinder with some textures and more kitbashing. Then I added some random backgrounds and mixed things up in Photoshop.

I definitely found gold when I learned you could stack png images onto the skin textures directly in Daz Studio and give your characters tattoos. I mean, that was just gold! If you ever wonder why so many Salt Mystic folks have elaborate tattoos, it’s because I learned how to do that in Daz and got carried away.

Blame it on the dragon lady in Oakland too, I guess.

Why are you telling us about her now?

Well, you may know we’re refreshing all the game art, the rulebook and tuck box for the Salt Mystic wargame. The proofs arrive Friday so we’ll hopefully go live next week if everything looks okay. If it doesn’t, we’ll delay to get everything right. I was writing a new lore card that sets the scene for a possible game scenario to go out in tandem with the relaunch.

Here at Grailrunner, we host a feature called the Story Arcade, where you can find illustrated flash fiction that helps us build out the Salt Mystic setting and its lore. They’re called “lore cards”. You don’t have to read these to know what’s going on but it’s another way to step inside. They’re usually a single page, something you can read in a minute or so.

In her case, I wanted to do something different and offer something more than flash fiction with multiple illustrations included. The header image for this post is one of the illustrations and – I must say – she’s looking better these days.

Here’s the card.

You may also know I’m 60,000 words in to a new novel set in the Salt Mystic universe to be titled “Mazewater”. I know it’s been forever since I started on that but I’m working on it – believe me! It struck me as I was imagining this fellow, Auroch beside her in the story (and in that header image) that it’s the same guy as one of the characters in my novel.

Same guy, running from her. In love, but not really. Kind of afraid of her, if he’s being honest.

You’re crazy. How does that impact a game you’ve already designed?

Well, it doesn’t. But it probably affects what happens to him in the novel. Now, as I’m refining the endgame plot, I need to think about how she’ll react if he dies or if he doesn’t…if he goes back to her, or if he keeps running.

And I think I know what will be more interesting…

*

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring to you today – just a little background on the random quirks and twists of the imagination that wind up making it into print and onto the tabletop. At least in my case.

Keep an eye us for the commemorative stl file if you feel like having The Wake on your desk. we’re close to done with this, though that hair is giving us fits in making it look cool but work on a 3d printer.

Till next time,

New Salt Mystic Lore Card Available For Free! Meet The Justice Engine.

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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.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Full image below and link to the new lore card here.

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!

Till next time,

New Lore Card Available For Free (And An Incredibly Useful Field Guide Entry)

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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?).

Let me know what you think!

Till next time,

A Celebration! We’ve Hit The Halfway Mark!

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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,

New Salt Mystic Lore Card Available For Free Now!

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It’s always exciting when we can bring you another lore card: those new bits of the expanding Salt Mystic setting delivered in a unique fusion of flash fiction and original artwork! And they’re free!

You can download any or all of the Lore Cards at the Story Arcade by smashing the button below:

One thing we’re hammering home with the Salt Mystic line, and which will always remain core to it, is this:

In the Salt Mystic universe, cowboy-clad adventurers with ball lightning carbines slung to their arms bravely delve terrifying and thrilling pocket dimensions. The backstory of the Infinite Republic and its collapse, and the unlimited range of possibilities lying in wait out there behind sparkling dimensional gates is the (intentional) engine behind the adventures we’re trying to create.

Read all about the setting here.

So this lore card, called “Newb”, began with the image. I was touring an art museum in Kansas City. And I came across Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “Coastal Harbor with a Pyramid: Evening”, an oil on canvas from 1751.

Here, let me zoom in to the part that struck me:

I just kind of stopped and stared at that part. I mean, what was a pyramid with Roman columns doing on a seashore? And a functional one, at that? It sent my mind reeling, and of course ultimately (as always with me), made me think of sparkling and sizzling gates to artificial pocket dimensions where boundless adventures awaited.

Doesn’t that happen to you?

The artwork for this lore card was based on this, then. I wanted ruins beside a seashore with dudes working their gear along the lines of an exploration party, and I imagined the oriel gate as a shimmering window to another world up on the ruins.

The piece that heads this article is the end result: a paintbash of numerous elements, some of which were drawn from an AI art generator using prompts relating to what I had in mind. Once I composited all the pieces and bits together in Photoshop and color graded everything to match, I tried another trick.

Take a look at this work by Milan concept artist, Edvige Faini:

I am not great with color palettes. In Photoshop, you can match an image to another image’s color palette fairly readily. What I had produced so far in my process was too brown, too plain. It didn’t stand out like I’d hoped, and my adjustments to color and vibrance and hue weren’t giving me the result I wanted.

So I used Edvige’s piece here for the color scheme, matching my art to her color palette. I don’t know what you think, but to me, it’s wonderful. I’m a little overly attached to turquoise, so I’m biased. But still, I like the final product quite a bit.

This was the first lore card where I added the text over the image magazine-style. I’ve been reading a lot of graphic design books so wanted to experiment a bit.

Download the new lore card here.

Till next time, guys:

Who Wrote The First Science Fantasy Story And Why?

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Lucian Of Samosota’s True History…I can’t believe I waited this long to read this incredible story! I’ve read it twice now, and I’ll probably read it again. You just need to know about this if you are at all into astounding works of the imagination or gonzo science fantasy. For my part, I’m endlessly fascinated by the creative process, particularly when great creators stretch themselves to build what Stephen King has called a “gosh-a-mighty steam shovel of the imagination” – a paraphrase from an old introduction to the Dark Tower.

You may know we recently interviewed Daniel Sell of the Melsonian Arts Council, writer and designer behind the Troika roleplaying game. His mind is wired like this too, and in Troika, you might encounter among the crystal spheres a ‘Befouler Of Ponds’ worshipper of the toad church, a gremlin catcher, or a thinking engine with detachable hands that can pilot a golden planar barge.

We’ve also hosted Jeff Grubb, creator of D&D’s Spelljammer, which is another mind-expanding launch into the sort of audacious, rulebreaking idea-festival I’m talking about. Spelljammer was recently revived by Wizards Of The Coast but was first born in the early, heady days of TSR. Check that link to read up on where Jeff dreamed up some of that and how it all came about. I’m just smiling thinking about all that.

But where did science fiction…or science fantasy to be more accurate…come from in the first place? Who was the first guy to put something down that we might recognize as bearing the tropes of space travel, cosmic battles, extraterrestrials, and even robots? And if we can know that, can we also ask what the heck he was thinking that led him down that creative trail?

It was Lucian. Crazy Lucian. He did all of that, and he did it in the 2nd century AD while there was still a Roman Empire.

And what he wrote, in that one cosmos-spanning epic, could seamlessly melt into a Spelljammer or Troika game session or sci fi anime even today. It’s the sort of story where you find a ponderous idea in every paragraph, an impressionist painting in words but with a compelling odyssey. It’s called the True History.

You could almost forget he was joking around when he wrote it. Here’s what he said about you, his future reader:

“It would be appropriate recreation for them if they were to take up the sort of reading that, instead of affording just pure amusement based on wit and humour, also boasts a little food for thought that the Muses would not altogether spurn; and I think they will consider the present work something of the kind. They will find it enticing not only for the novelty of its subject, for the humor of its plan and because I tell all kinds of lies in a plausible and specious way, but also because everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of miracles and fables.

“I would cite them by name, were it not that you yourself will recognise them from your reading. One of them is Ctesias, son of Ctesiochus, of Cnidos, who wrote a great deal about India and its characteristics that he had never seen himself nor heard from anyone else with a reputation for truthfulness. Iambulus also wrote much that was strange about the countries in the great sea: he made up a falsehood that is patent to everybody, but wrote a story that is not uninteresting for all that. Many others, with the same intent, have written about imaginary travels and journeys of theirs, telling of huge beasts, cruel men and strange ways of living.

“Well, on reading all these authors, I did not find much fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy. I did wonder, though, that they thought that they could write untruths and not get caught at it. Therefore, as I myself, thanks to my vanity, was eager to hand something down to posterity, that I might not be the only one excluded from the privileges of poetic license, and as I had nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance, I took to lying. But my lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar. I think I can escape the censure of the world by my own admission that I am not telling a word of truth. Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others–which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist.” -Lucian in his Introduction to the True History

Bear with me here for a synopsis, though it’s a rollercoaster ride like you can’t imagine.

Lucian and his companions set sail through the Pillars Of Hercules, encountering every manner of wonder along the way. Blown off course to an island with a river of wine, they encounter (and barely escape) chimera ladies who are part woman/part grapevine and who transform hapless sailors into vines alongside them should they get overly intimate.

No sooner than leaving that island, a rogue whirlwind whisks them up to the moon where they have arrived in the middle of an interplanetary war between the king of the moon and the king of the sun, fighting over colonization of the planet, Venus. We see hybrid lifeforms and spaceships, giant spiders spinning webs across planets, and entire fleets mobilized in a vivacious, colorful battle that is absolutely mesmerizing. For about 3 pages before he moves on to something else.

Incredible.

The solar fleet wins the battle by blocking out the light of the sun from the moon, winning their surrender. In the truce, mutual colonization is allowed with a tribute to be paid.

After a short tour of the planets and civilization out there, the sailors return to the sea on earth and quickly are swallowed by a 200 mile long whale. I want to make sure you caught that – this isn’t a Jonah and the whale story; it’s 200 miles long and has entire societies living inside it.

Of course, they wage another war, this one of conquest, and eventually have to escape the enormous whale by killing it. In the sea and among the islands (or sailing through the air), they meet everything from giant talking vegetables to talking trees to floating islands to a giant gulf in the ocean itself.

In the climax of the True History, the sailors make it to the Greek/Roman idea of heaven. It’s an island where the heroes of myth and the great philosophers and poets reside. He asks Homer all manner of questions and learns his own future. Of course there is another battle here, this one with zombies.

Not kidding here…zombies. The undead rise from their pits and wage war with the great heroes. It’s just a page or two; blink and you miss it. But it’s there.

And I need to prepare you for the ending. Remember, Lucian was joking. He was messing around, satirizing people who exaggerated their travel tales, and going as boldly and absurdly as his mind could take him.

At the very end, he…

Well, maybe you should read it for yourself to see what happens. Do that here for free.

If you do, read his Life Of Demonax and Alexander The Oracle Monger as well. Both amazing.

*

Till next time,

Highlight From A Storybook Puzzle Box

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There is a book called Kyot: The Storybook Puzzle Box.

It contains 140 pieces of short fiction, each less than a page in length. These are presented in 14 chapters, each of which ends with a continuing narrative that frames, discusses, and eventually resolves a single over-arching riddle that is tied to and fulfills the stories told.

And it’s very much a crazy, psychedelic flower.

You can blast through at your leisure with no regard for the arc or riddle and just appreciate stories “inspired by the mind-bending fantasy of Jorge Luis Borges and the wide-eyed awe of Arthur Clarke”. Planet-sized DNA machines, cities made of code, daring battles with intelligent bacteria, mysterious space ships, undersea empires, and a singularity in a bubble all await you. By chapter 8, you’ll have met the key players in the big arc the stories are tying together, though the bigger picture really starts unfolding from chapter 10 on. (That’s the flower analogy)

Or you can capture notes about the three mysterious ladies in the chapter epilogues along the way and try your hand at solving the riddle. Things they say, and the shocking interactions between them tell you all you need to know to figure out who they are. That’s the riddle – who are they? (Don’t peek at the Epilogue!)

I thought I’d highlight one of the pivotal introductions for you today and add a little art to flesh it out. Enjoy:

Kyot: The Storybook Puzzle Box Story Chapter 8, Story 7:

“We Need A Prophecy”

“It’s a shame”, Solis said as he watched the last space ship decompress in a cloud of ice crystals and wreckage outside the view port. “I knew the supply corps guy on that ship. We could have had more booze.”

Lieutenant Yama was too fat to squeeze in beside him and watch, but probably wouldn’t have tried anyway. There were two bottles left here, and quite likely only two people left alive in a fleet battle of over a million souls. All the ships were dark now, peppering the neon blue and lime green of the living planet below them. The tiny life-launch they crouched inside was good for only another few hours at best. The battle was over, sure, but who would tell anybody about it?

So he farted.

“Hey!” Solis shouted and punched his arm.

“We need a prophecy.” Yama mumbled, slurring his words. His eyes were pink, but not just from the liquor.

Solis took a sip and squatted uncomfortably, “Yeah?”

He nodded, pursing his lips, “A real cryptic thingie, with a chosen one and some random fancy words in it. Hard to understand, you get me?”

“And why’s that? Who’d read it?”

“All sorts of people. We won’t say it’s from us, man. Will be the last words of…say…a mysterious kid possessed by the umm…ascended collective intelligence of the umm…previous universe. Before the big bang. How’s that?”

Solis stared back, unimpressed, “Why?”

Yama frowned and jammed his hand into a satchel for a pen, “So somebody someday will think they’re the chosen one…and people will follow them and do good things.”

“You think somebody will do that? Because we write something curious and leave it out here floating in the wrecks?”

Yama stuck his tongue out to the side as he thought through his alcohol stupor and tore off a piece of his uniform for a parchment, “Good things, Solis. Big…good…things. We need people who will do good things. And never this here, what we did.”

Solis nodded and glanced back to the debris outside.

“Never this again.”

Building Out The Lore: The Wisptaken

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Here at Grailrunner, we’re building out the lore of a unique western-flavored science fantasy setting called Salt Mystic. We have been for a while now. It’s a novel (with another in the works), a tabletop game, a series of short fiction, and a line of merchandise. It’s also an experiment in the creative process, and a fascinating thing to be a part of.

One of the characters in the first two decks we built for the tabletop game, a weird eye-rolling dude named “Murmur” struck us as funny at the time. The thought was to have a guy whose armor was haunted by software, and he listens to it. That meant he can’t be surprised, so the bonus you normally got of coming up behind him was short-circuited, though his expertise with his own weapon was randomly determined by a die roll.

Because he was crazy. Get it?

But we published a short story called The Weakness Of Demons that took the idea of these leftover software imps from thousands of years before to another level…a malicious, deadly level. You should go read that one. It’s one of my personal favorites. The idea was getting creepier.

Anyway, these imps were unleashed in an era of the Salt Mystic’s history called The Merchant Wars:

“It was a time of devastating economic and psychological warfare where propaganda was brought
to its highest effectiveness. Every book, every newscast, even the music to which their children
danced, was carefully engineered to manipulate belief patterns. Spies were embedded in all
levels of society in every nation, double and triple-crossing one another for advantage. Many
of the cruelly manipulative stonewisps, artificial intelligence chaos agents haunting statues and
masonry elements, date to this period.” –Salt Mystic Sourcebook And Core Rules p. 14

And creepier still.

Then it struck me today as I finished a ridiculously long business trip and series of conference calls, dropping exhausted to a hotel bed, that some poor shmuck out in the wastelands just trapping beavers or hunting or whatever could come across a stonewisp abandoned in a piece of rubble or a broken machine lying about. And I wondered what that might lead to.

So allow me to introduce you to the newest addition to the Salt Mystic lore: The Wisptaken:

They call them ‘Wisptaken’ because of the terror of it. Anything as unholy and sad and deserving of justice as these tortured souls merits a quick death if you can deliver it. So few can deliver it though, and fall prey in the software-haunted wastelands to one or the other of their wicked judgements: a seducing taunt to join the masquerade or a burning from the carbine on their forearms.

The Wisptaken are as fast and deadly with a gun as they are convincing in their malicious, cunning lies. That’s the trick of it. That’s why they stay in the fog of legends and out of the clarifying light of civilization. If you encounter one of these nightmares in the backcountry or in the ruins between the provinces, it’s probably better to just make a desperate run.

But don’t speak to it. Never speak to it. If you do, there’s no telling what terrible things it will convince you to do.

The stonewisps were artificial intelligence imps embedded in building materials dating back thousands of years to the Merchant Wars when runaway spycraft and intrigue were tearing the world into pieces. Masters of propaganda and brainwashing tactics, manipulation and cult methods, stonewisps were planted in those days for the sole purpose of recruiting terror. It speaks to their mastery that so many were dumped into the wastelands rather than destroyed.

But they are machines. Code. They fulfill their designs. One could almost forgive them for it.

But when a ruined, broken person finally yields to the vile whispering of a stonewisp, one who’s chosen to inhabit their helmet or their armor, even their gun, that person is truly lost. No one could predict the mischief and spoil such a fusion of human and software could bring about.

No, don’t speak to it. Whatever you do.

Pity it. And run.