science fiction

Finally able to read my own book without worrying about goofs I missed…

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I’m proud that I can raise kids, hold down a pretty demanding day job, deal with adulting, and also manage to publish a novel, a tabletop skirmish game, a book of short stories, and a roleplaying game. I decided many years ago that I would focus my imagination on building out a detailed world rather than bounce around with various unrelated concepts and I feel I’ve learned an incredible amount of fantastic skills along the way.

So the world of Salt Mystic has been my imagination’s playground for over a decade now.

But one thing that sucks about being a writer, at least for me, is that I really…really…struggle to sit down and read something I wrote. I can’t squash the crippling dread that I’ll stumble across a misspelled word, a forgotten fragment I mistakenly left when I edited something, or – and this is the worst – a contradiction or plot hole. The dream I had when I designed our most recent publication, SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, was that I finally had a doorway to step into this world I’ve spent so much time making. It’s a roleplaying game designed from the ground up for solo players but able to simply and cleanly launch you into the Salt Mystic world.

But it’s been a year and a half since I finished it and only earlier today was I able to pick it up for any length of time and peruse the introduction, skim the map, and consult some of the oracles tables in the appendix without the creeping dread peeing on my experience.

And it was kind of awesome, honestly.

Grailrunner claimed when we put this RPG out that it was “effortless roleplaying”. I tested that out by blindly following the oracles for a character generation (appearance, name, and background), an inciting rumor my character heard somewhere, a general storyline theme, a NPC I was to meet, and some places we would go. I intentionally didn’t bring anything to the experience and made an honest effort to just step inside and see who and what I would meet.

Although I wrote all that material, I did so in a mad 3-year fury of flipping through art books and random mythology texts, brainstorming, sketching random blobs, and generally letting my imagination just do what it does with abandon. The truth is – I found a lot of what I saw in my own book unfamiliar enough that it surprised me. So today I thought I’d recap the adventure that resulted with some illustrations for a more dynamic presentation. Pretty much everything that happened was just me following the guidance in the book and doing what I felt like doing along the way.

Care to join me?

*

That’s me. Cain Blackwick. I wear a big floppy hat and I’m always dirty for some reason. I say inappropriate things and offend people a lot, so no friends of any good repute. Because of something that happened to me in my past, I’m followed at a distance by a voiceless Fog Man who will probably kill me one day. For now, he just follows me and watches.

I heard a rumor in a market that the pilgrim train that leads to the Augur has left its rails and taken flight, and that it would be stopping at a tower in this little town into which I’d stumbled. Not having the money to buy a ticket, I snuck onto the train. I’m pretty good at that kind of thing. It’s called the Tanglesouls Express and it’s kind of a big deal. My Fog Man just sort of drifted up in his poisonous cloud and kept me in sight the whole time. The creep!

Unfortunately, the train drifted off its course in a thunderstorm. When the announcement warned of a layover for the night in a floating debris field, I was one of the only people who climbed outside the train to take a look around in the middle of the night. What I saw was this:

It was a derelict flying ship, seemingly built around an oriel gate. Oriels are artificial pocket dimensions, and gates like these are littered all over the place – usually forgotten. Sometimes there is treasure and wonder inside. Sometimes there are beasts that would eat you as soon as sniff you. Always a good time though! This one was just sitting there sparkling, so I jumped down off the train onto some floating debris, hopped from one piece of flotsam to another until I could grab the weathered hull.

A metallic plaque named its inner world, the world inside that gate, as Rendel’s Vengeance. I could just make out some plains and misty gray-brown blurs inside past the dimensional warping. It wouldn’t have mattered what I saw because I was going to go inside no matter what. That’s what oriels are for!

The grasslands extended to the horizon. That, I could understand. I just hadn’t expected Pteranodons in the skies. I filed that away in case I could figure out how to tame and ride one. But it was the giant walking buildings that surprised me the most. I named them “spirewalkers” since I didn’t know what they were. It looked like there were cities here once, saturated with computronium, and bits of them must have just grown legs and decided to wander off in a herd.

“Have you ever seen something like that?” I asked my Fog Man, but he only glared at me like he always does.

Anyway, I followed one of the spirewalkers to understand better what I was looking at, how they thought, and where such a thing might want to go, and eventually I came across a scrap of old parchment with a handwritten phrase on it:

“Everything is new today. And will be again tomorrow.”

That’s what it said. It seemed sappy and unhelpful but at least it meant there was likely somebody around here writing things like that. While I was looking for tracks or footprints, any kind of sign of where the person who had written that might have gone, I was attacked (if that’s the right word) by a malfunctioning golem who seemed to think he was repairing himself but needed parts from me to do it.

While I dealt with him, my Fog Man just hovered from his distance. I always wondered what that ghostly jackass would do if I was getting killed and cheating him of the pleasure of doing the deed himself. I’m still not sure because I did manage to get the golem stepped on by one of those walking buildings. And that’s when I met this fellow here:

Boston Hember was his name. He was a fairly nice guy: exiled diplomat who apparently failed at averting a cataclysmic war back home. Or something. I guess he just wanders oriels and leaves behind these poems and sunshine nonsense to make up for his failure. It would have been great had Boston showed up a little earlier than he did to help with the kooky golem who wanted to pry out my ribcage but it was still good to see another human.

He told me he’d only ever seen one other person inside this oriel and the fellow was dying when they met. Of course, this dying fellow had said something mysterious right before his last breath. They always say something mysterious with that last breath. In this case, it seemed pregnant with story potential:

“Traps all in the woods, leading to the cavern – they don’t do that for nothing.”

He felt like he’d located all the traps leading to this supposed cavern and had them mapped pretty cleanly. Said he’d been hesitating to go alone but it was eating him up to learn what was in that cavern. Said it was fate that I’d showed up just on the day he was thinking he’d go find out.

“Yeah, screw it. Let’s go.” That’s me. And going to mysterious places was why I was here anyway.

Cutting that part short, we eventually got inside that trapped cavern and found an opening to another grassland plain, or maybe a part of this world we couldn’t access otherwise. And you wouldn’t believe what we found over there!

Another oriel gate! Inside the first pocket dimension we were wandering around in was a second gate leading to who knows where! The only trouble was it was locked and chained up, with dimensional energy leaking out in blinding blue-green light. Something in Boston’s voice, in his eyes maybe, told me he had actually been this far already and knew exactly what we were going to find there. I couldn’t have explained how I knew that other than it was just a feeling (and appendix 7).

“Nope,” I said. “Things that are chained are chained for a reason.” With that, I was planning on leaving Boston to his misadventure of releasing some hell-beast or cult or whatever was on the other side of that gate when the guy pulled a knife on me!

I didn’t kill him. I’m not that kind of adventurer. I did take his knife, though. It was a pretty sweet braided blade with some shape-changing morphium impregnating the steel. I liked the way it rippled when you held it out in front of you. When I left Boston there, he’d probably had much better days and might still be scheming to come after me one day.

“He can stand in line, right, Foggie?” I said that to my Fog Man but the creep just glared at me.

So, anyway, I thought better of the chained gate thing and of chasing supposed enigmatic comments from hypothetical dying men and took a whole different approach altogether.

You wouldn’t believe all the loot still lying around in the drawers and closets of these old walking buildings!

*

I hope you found that as amusing as I did. It was really fun to treat this wonderful book like something I didn’t sweat and stress over for years and just let it do its thing as it was designed to do.

If you want to buy a copy of SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for yourself, just smash the Buy It Now button below:

And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Till next time,

Slowly writing a novel when AI could’ve knocked this out already…

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Are you using AI to write your novel?

I’m not against AI as a better Google. For example, I needed to know recently whether crickets still croak at night in late autumn and what wild mustard would smell like if you sat on it. These are the kind of weird questions writers come up with and – if you’re me – completely block the ability to progress with the work until they’re answered.

Here are some others (and trust me, all totally legitimately asked in the context of feverishly trying to complete a science fantasy novel):

  1. What are gorilla boobs called?
  2. Where exactly do blind people place their fingers on someone’s face to read their expression?
  3. What is the difference between a glyph and a sigil?
  4. What causes the black streaks beneath a crying woman’s eyes: eyeliner or mascara?
  5. Say a man’s arm is severed and cauterized by a sentient cablesword – would it steam, bleed, smoke, or all three?

Forgive me. I like odd details when I’m reading books so I want them in my own concoctions. And I want them to be right. Something like Gemini or ChatGPT can handle these iterative conversations to answer questions like these better than a Google search. Far better and much faster.

Okay, what about the writing, though? The creation of the work itself?

I’m also not against AI handling the monotonous and thankless task of resolving thorny punctuation issues. My kryptonite punctuation errors so far have been:

  1. I join two complete thoughts with commas rather than semicolons. I never liked semicolons. They look weird but whatever.
  2. I forget to add commas when I use introductory phrases (“Beneath the plaque Mazewater noticed old carvings.” – missing comma after ‘plaque’
  3. …

You know what – let’s leave that topic. I did a search for punctuation goofs I had to fix and it’s embarrassing. You get my point on an editor that can quickly resolve where a comma goes and whether to bust up a sentence is awesome.

But the writing?

Well, somewhat more controversially, I’m very much in favor of quick and dirty concept art by AI to help me visualize a character or backdrop I’m dreaming up in the way that George Lucas used Ralph McQuarrie and so many others in his own worldbuilding.

Meet Uncle Ong, for example, based on my descriptions (if you read Mazewater one day, this guy will break your heart – I promise):

So what are you saying?

Yeah, I’m writing this myself. No AI for that. As slow as I am, I still want to say I built something with my own hands. It’s why I’m in the gig in the first place.

Still, a lot of people are avoiding AI because they rightly have concerns about intellectual property and diminishing quality of work that is increasingly produced by software. Legit concerns, yes, but neither is insurmountable. I also feel that, as a creator, failing to have cutting edge AI tools in your kit is like trying to hold back the ocean with a kitchen knife.

Maybe it makes you a person of principle. But it puts you behind your competitors for sure.

I’m Brian Bennudriti, creator of the Salt Mystic universe, and I’m several years in to writing the next novel in that setting. It’s to be titled MAZEWATER. In February, I told you here about my plan to speed up how long it takes me to finish a novel. My record, unfortunately, is 7 years. I’m getting old, man. My kids are practically grown. How likely at this pace is it I finish even a handful of novels like I planned? The ideas inside my head are exploding into life but I can’t capture it in the words quickly enough. Still, it’s the same fire now that lit up my mind as a child…the love of creating an imagined world.

What I told you in that February article remains true and I believe I’m moving with more focus and less backtracking. But I saw a headline the other day that led me down an unpleasant and depressing rabbit hole.

“Nobody plays video games anymore.” That’s what it said. The reason it hit me hard was I’ve long speculated that future storytelling frontiers would be in gaming: tabletop and in large-scale video games. Much like Walt Disney and those early anime illustrators made a true art of cartoons long perceived as childishness before them, like Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman made true literature of comics, again long perceived as childishness, I’ve been convinced that games like Tainted Grail and Elder Scrolls were the future of storytelling.

Yet the article cited research by Matthew Ball, which you can learn more about here. To boil it down for you, there are too many things competing for our attention. We struggle to care about anything new, so gamers play Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Roblox, and Minecraft because it’s easier to just stay where you are. Switching costs are high to learn a new world, even if they are amazing. Everything else is high-dose dopamine in Tik Tok bursts of frenetic nonsense.

You write science fiction & fantasy! What do you care about video games?

The National Endowment for the Arts found that the share of US adults who had read any novel or short story during the preceding year declined from 45.2% in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022. The share reading any book fell from 54.6% to 48.5% over the same period. A separate analysis of the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell by approximately 40% between 2003 and 2023—from roughly 28% to 16%.

Yeah, it’s not just video games, man. We’re all hooked on dopamine from our phones, killing our attention spans, and the economics and psychology of dealing with the learning curve and investing in new worlds is stacked very much against something new coming into the literary universe. If I make the most perfect setting and the most interesting characters with dialogue and action that pops, who will read it?

You’re depressing me.

Hold that thought. That same American Time Use Survey said those who still read spent considerable time doing so: approximately 97 minutes on days when they read in 2023. Publishers Weekly reported that US print sales rose slightly in 2025 and remained above pre-pandemic levels, while romance and romantasy experienced strong growth. Audiobook revenue rose 9% in 2025 to $2.43 billion, and fiction accounted for approximately 71% of audiobook sales.

The folks who ARE reading are still voracious about it. If you’ve ever been to a comic or pop culture convention, you’ll meet the most incredible people in the world. And they’re all dreamers who want to enter worlds like this. What I’m saying is they’re still out there, and they’re still consuming massive amounts of content. What is weakening is the audience’s willingness to enter a long work before it has proven its value. People still devote hundreds of hours to stories they love. They are less willing to devote six mediocre hours to finding out whether they might eventually love something.

So what does that mean for storytelling?

I believe I’ve mentioned Yu-Kai Chou and his mind-bending framework for leveraging gaming psychology for human motivation and change management which he calls Octalysis. Read about that here. He’s the first guy I ever heard talk about the steps of game design:

  1. Discovery (how players find your game at all)
  2. On-boarding (how players overcome a learning curve & achieve quick wins)
  3. Scaffolding (how players gain a sense that the game is going somewhere so they invest more heavily)
  4. Endgame (how players receive a sense of accomplishment and reward)

I’m seeing parallels for this set of steps in the future of storytelling, honestly. I see an increasing importance on merchandise, art, and social media interaction to draw people in with the hook for the imagined world. I see that future storytellers may have to be more visual thinkers and incorporate strong, intriguing visuals that can be sticky in the minds of people who chance across them. Maybe more than that though, I’m struck by the increasing importance of the opening. That first five pages. If you don’t hook someone there, then you won’t hook them at all. Too much is waiting to steal their attention away, and much of that is optimized through algorithms with their big, pointy teeth to be better at stealing attention than the writer is.

*

Just a few thoughts as I round the corner at about 80,000 words in the work in progress. I thought I’d be ending the book around this word count but I will very likely push it to ~100,000 words. It feels more correct at that length. I promise I’ve trimmed and cut all the fat! I’m not rambling. It’s a tight and intriguing ride in my opinion. Just needs to simmer a bit for these wonderful paper people to feel real and for the world to shake like it needs to.

Anyway, I hope this has been food for thought. I’ll share more about Mazewater over the coming months as things finish up. If you have any questions about it, feel free to let me know.

Till next time,

It takes me seven years to write a novel – and I plan to fix that!

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Oh, wow, if you could have been with me at a rainy beach in New Hampshire in 2015! I had a half-day to myself, off from work with a rainy New England afternoon free. I drove from Portsmouth where I was working down to Hampton Beach. It was cold, gray, and everything was closed for the winter. There was one couple on the beach trying to make a romantic walk of it, but it was the slow, drizzling, mean kind of cold rain that soaks into your bones.

Most of the framework and plot of the novel I’d been writing for years had been rattling around in my head since my time in the Navy in the late 90’s. That’s a long time to cook the soup! I get that. And I’d been writing that book, my first one, for over 6.5 years. Almost 7. But I was close. All the threads I wanted to tie up were pretty much tied. I was planning to see if I could just park near the beach, prop open the laptop there in the car to the pat-pat of light rain, and see what I could do to carry things over the finish line.

There’s a statue of a lonesome woman staring at the sea there. I was down the beach some from her, facing the water same as she was. It was a great vibe, honestly. Not physically comfortable, but amazing for creative inspiration. And I did it! That last image…the last conversation…the final closeout I’d been looking for…it went onto the page all by itself. I couldn’t believe it! No one in the world to tell about it, and no one would probably even understand what a big deal that was for me, but it was truly done. Not rushed and not compromised.

Done, the way I wanted it.

What’s the big deal about that?

Writing a novel is challenging to every aspect of your life. Time spent writing is time away from your family. It’s time not working on your day job. And it’s hard – ridiculously hard! Stories grow more complex than you wanted, and characters change from what you made them to be. Dialogue that sounded awesome in your head repeats back as strained, alien, and as plot dumps when that wasn’t what you intended at all.

I was trying to earn my way, be a husband and a father, but still turn visions in my head into something real that could say something meaningful and outlast me: a world people could step inside. But I felt selfish every time I wasn’t playing a game with my wife or watching a movie with my daughter or taking my son fishing. Writing a novel is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most life-altering. It changed me for the better.

Okay, so what are we talking about here?

It takes too long. That’s what I’m saying. Need to fix that. I’m over 4 years in to the novel I’m writing now. Not cool if I’m still banging away on it for three more years.

Talk to me, Grailrunner – how do we speed up the creative process?

If you’re a novelist, like the kind of folks who might read Grailrunner and nod, you feel the tug of two opposing forces:

  • You want your story clean, logical, tight, like a well-made blade
  • You write in spirals, rewrites, loops, hollows — messy, intuitive, iterative

Tell me I’m not alone in that. Anyway, it feels like a flaw to rewrite because it feels like starting over. I’m thinking in layers, but trying to polish before I’ve built the foundation.

But it struck me recently that concept artists have figured this out!

Many visual artists, particularly concept artists, work in ways that seem counter-intuitive. They don’t sit down with a crystalline vision of what they expect the final image to look like. Instead they check the brief and then:

  • Lay down marks, then react
  • Let accidental shapes guide the next decision
  • Build texture before form
  • Play off of unexpected accidents
  • Iterate forward, not backward

I wondered for myself then – this idea of a visual artist pressing ahead with abandon, careless of the final picture, knowing there will be revisions later but enjoying the process for itself and riffing off what they lay down – could that help me?

And?

Here are five principles I’m locking in for myself – maybe they’ll be helpful for you:

1. Generate the back cover text now

I built the entire cover for the book, including the artwork, but more importantly the back cover text. I printed it off in glorious color and even folded it into the size and shape of the final product so I could hold it in my hand. I needed that kind of focus on the story I’m telling (and why) to help me trim shiney bits and bobs that kept raining down from the sky. It’s a laser beam now. Anything not feeding that back cover promise is out!

2. Tell someone the one-line summary of what the book is about

My brother surprised me with the question when I was hip-deep in an action sequence and I hated my ill-prepared, off-the-cuff answer so much I called him two days later with a sharper and better one. Now, it’s like a mantra in my head helping me stick to that promise too. Like the back cover exercise, but even tighter!

3. Get to know the characters better before forcing them into a pre-defined plot

I spent some quality time just extrapolating for myself on what the main folks care about, what they’ve been up to when they’re not “on screen”, and some great backstory that might never make it to the page. AI tools like ChatGPT can accept your work-in-progress manuscript and engage with you in full conversations in those character voices. Crazy way to create a work of art, but an interesting way to immerse yourself in your own story!

4. Draft without editing – for real this time

I press ahead now on the chapter at hand. Just blast it out as intended, almost in a rush, to lay out the skeleton of what’s supposed to happen and let these people do what I know they would do. Tomorrow, I’ll go back over it again and catch the nonsense and the plot holes, the contradictions. Like the concept artist checking the brief, but then just laying down random marks according to what seems right, I’m applying that to the written page. The difference is the freedom now to avoid stopping constantly, in real-time, to worry over whether something makes sense right now and stop to fix it immediately.

5. Accept it when cool things need to die because they no longer fit

Oh, it’s hard! I liked Ilianore a lot, but you’ll never meet her. The climactic spearing from the sky – pretty sure that’s gone too. A midnight flight on a train – also gone. I’m trying, man. I’m trying to turn things loose now when they seemed so amazing but just don’t match up with where things are going or what these people would do. I’m considering short funerals for some, but for sure I’m pasting some of that old text into a document to save in a folder somewhere in case it ever needs to come back to life. Director’s cuts, sort of.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. These principles are speeding things along for me, at least. And I’m noticing a lot less hair growing on the plot these days. Less massive revisions are even necessary. Let’s hope that’s the process working its magic and not also my imagination.

Till next time,

Merry Christmas from Grailrunner!

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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.

Here’s that image (if you’re curious), and a link to the entire book in which it was published.

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.

Till next time,

Yes, there’s a Grailrunner theme song now

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Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.

I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:

Who is Grailrunner?

So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.

No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.

So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.

I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.

Here’s a link to hear it.

Here are the lyrics, by the way.

And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.

Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.

Till next time,

A resurrected Harlan Ellison helps settle the question of shock value in storytelling

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Harlan would hate this. With a bullet. But it’s happening.

We’re making hay while the sun shines, trying out a premium ChatGPT subscription and bringing all sorts of people back to life or mashing them together into alternate realities for our entertainment. And honestly, some of these simulations of literary or artistic geniuses are surprisingly accurate to how they thought and spoke. So far, we’ve hosted a hilarious debate about conciseness in storytelling with Stephen King, Hemingway, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Professor Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Homer called Verbosity & Vine and had Professor Tolkien write a new 2,000 word King Arthur short story with an evil grail titled The Black Chalice of Broceliande. There is absolutely going to be a Seinfeld Season 10 post at some point, once I pipe Modern Seinfeld prompts into ChatGPT and let the horses run.

Anyway, welcome to a series we call:

Since the King versus Hemingway debate wound up so funny, we thought it would be a hoot to smash some more genius creators together and have them argue the merit of shock value in storytelling. To remind everyone: our policy at Grailrunner is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

This simulated argument was entirely written by AI with prompts from us, but really took on a life of its own. We decided who joined the conversation, and some of those choices really wound up fantastic. In fact, things really surprised us when we had Professor Tolkien join this conversation as well, as he kind of cleaned everyone’s clock on the matter at hand and got suddenly inspiring. That just happened – we can’t take credit for it! Ellison, at least for our part, stole the show though.

The conversation is called Fire Beneath the Ink:

Key players (all deceased) from left to right are:

Professor J. R. R. Tolkien – author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and master craftsman of worldbuilding.

Harlan Ellison – a fiercely imaginative and outspoken American writer known for his prolific work in speculative fiction, particularly short stories, television scripts, and essays that challenged social norms and literary conventions. Also one of the finest writers to ever punch a typewriter.

Antonin Artaud – a radical French dramatist, poet, and theorist best known for developing the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to shock audiences into confronting the deeper truths of human existence. He once threw meat at his audience.

Charles Dickens – a celebrated English novelist and social critic whose vividly drawn characters and dramatic storytelling captured the struggles and injustices of Victorian society. Nobody has ever been better at generating pathos and character empathy than this guy.

Jonathan Swift – an Irish satirist, essayist, and clergyman best known for his sharp wit and scathing critiques of politics and society, particularly in works like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

Random? Maybe a little. They all seemed to suit the topic at hand though, and Artaud and Harlan got along famously! See for yourself by smashing the cover button below!

So funny! We hope you enjoyed the debate. Somehow, it was nice to hear from Harlan again, and with him in good humor, poking at people and enjoying himself. If you’re familar with him at all, surely you see how much he would loathe this entire idea and likely drive to my house and tell me so.

And what about that Professor?! Did you get tingles at the end? We sure did.

Anyway, come back often and check on us. We’re unleashing the creative hordes here.

Till next time,

One Month Into Book Launch: How’s That Going?

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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!

Google Ads 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…

*

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!

Till next time,

Innovations in Music and Mythmaking (and how to link them!)

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I’m told my reading habits are a little out there. I get that. I do.

However, it intrigues me that in almost any field of human endeavor, there is a specific type of personality that thrives on breaking its rules and forging incandescent new ways of doing things. If you’re new here, that’s almost entirely what we do here – find, spotlight, analyze, and celebrate innovation in the creative process.

So I was reading this book about 1960’s beach music:

I don’t like that sort of music at all. I especially detest men singing falsetto and lyrics obsessing over the teenage emotional range. However, I had heard that the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, was considered the greatest and most influential album in music history. Knowledgeable people say that. I wanted to understand why in the world that would be, given its niche genre, its terrible album cover and name, and the fact that it isn’t chock full of top 10 hits.

What was so special? And once I knew that, I would of course ask: what inspired it?

I’ll cut to the chase since the answers to those questions don’t actually comprise my point today. I want to extend some of these lessons over to mythmaking and storytelling since that’s my main jam. (If you’re into this crossover of music and storytelling, I wrote about this sort of thing in an article called “Aesthetic Puzzles: When Bach Met Shakespeare”, which you can go catch here.)

Why is Pet Sounds a big deal?

Brian Wilson was the main creative driver behind the 1960’s-era pop band, the Beach Boys, and took a break from touring in 1965 to focus on creating “the greatest rock album ever made”. Till then, their songs were bubble-gum melodies of no real sophistication and lyrics aimed like a piledriver at teenagers having fun, especially in and around the rapidly-growing fad of surfing. Wilson was enamored with the “wall of sound” production techniques of music producer, Phil Spector, which involved using echo chambers and physical studio arrangements augmenting studio manipulation of recorded tracks to generate robust, layered textures of sounds that would come across richly on a jukebox. Spector’s stated logic behind his own innovation was:

“I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record.”

So it was mono (versus stereo) playback technology and the limited fidelity of speakers available at the time that prompted Spector to layer sounds together and experiment with ways of making the sounds more textured. Wilson felt the Beatles album, Rubber Soul contained some of the most mature lyrics yet for the band, and from these two launch points, he wanted to get more emotional with his lyrics and more experimental with his production techniques to surpass them all.

Wilson wound up innovating in all areas, and indeed developing intriguing ways of making the studio itself an instrument: combining, for example, multiple instruments simultaneously into a blended and new quality that sounded nothing like any of them. He introduced novel instruments like bicycle bells, a variation on the theremin, among others, in a rogue recording marathon of studio musicians while the actual band was out touring. Nobody had done that before, or even went off the trail of a small ensemble like that to make an album that couldn’t actually be played live. He also experimented with chord voicings, meaning how different chords are brought together (a little out of phase, for example, so there’s a slightly noticeable tremor) or avoiding a definitive key signature. By all accounts, Wilson’s efforts with the band surpassed anything Spector had done or would do. He took the inspiration and ran with it.

Studio musicians involved said of the time that they knew something very different was happening. Something important. It was interesting to me, reading what it felt like for the other guys there, the ones just hired to do a thing and realizing they were part of something.

So the idea to hold in your head then, for my point to land, is this: an approach towards recording music where all manner of frequencies and qualities of instruments and voices are layered over each other in a rich texture of sounds that you could listen to a multitude of times with headphones on and the volume turned up and still catch new things.

Texture. That’s the thing to remember. Innovating with texture.

What’s all this got to do with storytelling?

I’ve spent the last 3 years working on an approach to storytelling and tabletop roleplaying that I engineered to be as innovative as I could manage. I tried to rethink how narrative games like Dungeons & Dragons function and streamline everything down to core essentials.

“The awe and danger of exploration inside the covers of a book.” That was my compass. It’s here, called SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I’m not trying to sell you that right now, though. I want to talk about using it as a recording studio like Wilson did.

This idea now of texture and layered elements building a rich tapestry to transform a familiar art form into something different and new prodded a new question for me:

Can the elements of mythology and storytelling play the same role for the written word that musical notes, chords, and rhythms play? Instead of playing for the ear a rich tapestry like that, can archetypes and themes be arranged to play for the emotions?

Here are the commonly accepted themes of mythology and folklore in a table, arranged into numbered entries appropriate for a roll of D100 dice:

Here are the common character types of mythology, similarly arranged:

And finally, here are the common situational types of mythology:

SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS is designed in a similar manner, with appendix tables for all manner of characters, encounters, and places arranged along the 100-scale like this, appropriate for idle shopping, dice rolls, or use of the bibliomancy mechanic core to the book’s function. The concept with the book is to forge a solo adventure and tell yourself an amazing, resonating story.

The analogy I’m drawing today is that themes and types of mythology have a power and resonance very much like the comforting, stable floor of bass in music. A deep, low melody on bass grounds a melody and makes it richer, makes it seem more important. That’s how myths work. I’m imagining incorporating elements from these tables into a solo tabletop adventure to make them play the same role…

…to summon them so they must work their magic.

I picture roleplaying game rulesets like the one in the BOOK OF LOTS as recording studios: an engine of creation that wasn’t available to previous generations that we can bend to dazzling new heights like Wilson did.

I see elements of oracle tables like those in BOOK OF LOTS or Ironsworn, Starforged, the Dungeon Dozen volumes 1 and 2, and other amazing sourcebooks as chords and notes.

And I see the solo player as a crazy artist, just messing with things to see what new comes out of it all. Telling new stories. Jamming new jams.

My head is swimming at the thought of this. I wonder if it’s too much coffee or if there’s something to be said, truly, about combinations of mythic elements arranged like music. Intriguing idea for me today, at least, to bring it to you today.

Till next time,

Let’s Visit Larry Niven’s Integral Trees

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One of my first obsessions was Larry Niven‘s science fiction. Back in the day, we had a pool table in a big living room where the air conditioning was a box unit embedded in the wall. That AC made the most comforting white noise you could imagine, and to lay on my belly under that pool table reading A HOLE IN SPACE, NEUTRON STAR, CONVERGENT SERIES, RINGWORLD, and PROTECTOR (still on my shelf, so I can read off the names for you) was amazing.

I knew he was extrapolating from hard science. Some of what he was describing was just beyond my reach, but I could make out enough at 10 or 12 years old to know this was fascinating stuff. The naughty bits were cool too, and he seemed to revel in those things. I was his target audience.

Then in probably 1983 or 1984, I talked my mom into buying me his latest: a book called INTEGRAL TREES.

The text on the back hooked me entirely: “Critics long thought Niven would find it difficult to surpass his Hugo-winning novel RINGWORLD – the story of an artificial world, a ribbon of unreasonably strong material 1 million miles wide and 600 million miles long. They were right. Until now, that is. In THE INTEGRAL TREES Niven presents a fully fleshed culture of evolved humans who live without real gravity in the gas torus that rotates about a neutron star. This is the novel his fans have been awaiting!”

I remember flattening the hardback so I could make out the entire cover image to try and understand better what I was reading, and it’s a real dazzler by the great Michael Whelan:

Unfortunately, I didn’t know what an integral sign was shaped like. I didn’t know what a “torus” or a “tuft” was, and even when I looked these things up in the dictionary (dictionary?!), I couldn’t visualize anything in what I was reading beyond people could float weightlessly. Honestly, it seemed this would be awesome if I knew even half of what these sciencey words meant, but I was 10. So I bailed.

I hated that book for years because of that. On a side note, I went on and earned a Physics degree and worked in nuclear engineering for a while, and now I’ve packed in another 40 years beyond when I first laid beneath that pool table to try and visit Niven’s fascinating setting.

For no other reason than I came across its title on Youtube randomly, a couple of weeks ago, it was time to try again.

I’ve finished THE INTEGRAL TREES as well as its unfortunate sequel, THE SMOKE RING, and I believe I’m prepared to describe the visuals and dynamics to you so you can have an easier time than my early self (and from what I understand from reviews and people on-line, many, many others!). I’m a big fan of environmental science fiction like RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, RINGWORLD, RIVERWORLD, SCAVENGER’S REIGN, and others, so if that’s you at all – hang on, here. There’s good and bad, my friend. Good and bad.

Let’s head to a faraway binary star system where a neutron star (Voy) and a Sun-like star play gravity tug-of-war with each other, locking in a dead planet (Gold). The planet had a thick atmosphere once, but that’s being stripped away by the tidal forces making a stable doughnut-shaped gas torus that, believe it or not, is breathable and inhabitable within a specific zone.

Picture yourself climbing up a thick tree canopy, in fact so thick that people have established tunnels through it and built huts inside. It’s easy for you, as gravity seems to be much lighter than you’re accustomed to here on Earth. You come up on an enormous tree limb and realize this is no normal tree. In fact, as you make your way along its length to the trunk, you find the trunk itself is so incredibly large it appears to be a flat wooden wall. It must be 60 miles long to have a trunk this size.

You press on, climbing upwards to find the top of the canopy and hopefully understand better where you are. There’s light up there, sparkling through the leaves. Bright clouds. Maybe a strong wind – you start to feel a stiff breeze against your skin. A wet mist, like that near a big waterfall, tickles the skin of your forearms as you approach the light. You poke your head up through the canopy and:

Indeed, the tree is bigger than you imagined, stretching into the distance above you as far as you can see, with a yellow sun way up there making a halo around its fuzzy far end. You squint and can just make out against the glare that the massive tree is bare along the bulk of its trunk above your canopy here though it appears to have a similar clump of foliage on the opposite side of the trunk from yours though that’s just a thin hair-like black silhouette to you this far away. The entire tree is shaped like a planetoid-sized elongated “S” with you clinging to the bottom left-hand curve of it. Your tree limb juts off the main trunk, though it’s so large a hundred others like you could just live here.

The wind against your face is strong and constant. You can squint against it, but honestly, it’s easier to just look in the opposite direction. That’s when you notice that the very sky here, blue and hazy and beautiful, is full of life and trees just like this one. In fact, perhaps thousands of such trees drift like spokes inside this gas ring and all around you, all oriented radially so they point down at the neutron star far below your feet.

Whale-looking beasts and birds with sharp blades for beaks soar past like airplanes. It’s a bountiful frontier, seemingly ready for hunters. A ball-shaped jungle appears:

In the hazy blue-gray, you see the silhouettes of tall, thin people tied to lines and floating in the sky weightlessly, aiming harpoons at something among the trees of the jungle. It dawns on you that you can stand here atop this mighty tree limb and gaze upwards at them, but were you to climb this trunk, the pull of gravity would fade to nothing.

So you start climbing, because that sounds awesome.

It takes no time at all before you’re having to hold on to knurls and warps in the trunk to avoid drifting into the sky. High above you, people are swimming in a raindrop as big as a sky scraper. It’s a lake, pulled into an elongated sphere by surface tension. And they’re swimming inside!

This place is perhaps the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s what you’re thinking as you make it far enough to at least glimpse the far end of the tree, the end closest to the yellow sun. And you realize as other settlements come into view that they’re upside-down to you! The pull of the yellow sun is their down. The pull of the neutron star below was yours.

Now, here in the center, there is no such thing as down.

The thought of jumping into the sky is too much for you. It’s terrifying, but thrilling. You wave at one of the folks in the distance, and a hazy-gray silhouette waves back. You think you can make it to them. At the very least, they might toss you a rope and pull you in.

What the heck! Maybe that big old whale-thing will take you on its back. Whatever! You jump and don’t look back.

*

Anyway, that’s how I saw it. The setting for these two books is amazing, and it gets better as the main characters start exploring and also as you can better visualize where they’re going and what it would look and feel like.

The issue is the writing. The plot of the first book is great until it isn’t. Way too much time is spent in a location and with a plot point that is just annoying and a terrible decision. I believe if you’re going to make the environment the lead, it’s just wrong-headed to add a host of extraneous sideways quests and traps that don’t really add to the feeling many of us were drawn to in the first place. (I’m taking that advice, by the way, in the book I’m writing now based on this very experience!).

The characterization is nonsense too. Everyone speaks the same, and that’s like Larry Niven. An orbital mechanics textbook would have more interesting dialogue. I especially cringe when people obsess over “mating” and “making babies” in Niven’s effort to head off questions about gene pool viability. Ladies in these books are cartoon-like in their willingness to pleasure or be impregnated by pretty much any male. Again, I was the target audience for that sort of thing back in the day. Now, it’s just embarrassing and silly.

Please avoid the sequel, THE SMOKE RING. No reason to read that. You’re not going to get any more great exploration or insight into the ecosystem. Just the idea of growing a round tree. Everything else is silly and very, very difficult to plod through.

So if the writing is so bad, why am I heartily recommending you read THE INTEGRAL TREES?

You know the answer! This setting is incredible and unforgettable. It would make a compelling anime setting, or a video game background. I just wish a stronger story with better characters inhabited it.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Let me know what you think if you take the plunge too.

Till next time,

Science Fantasy Adventures Fueled By A Bibliomancy Oracle

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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.

Where will this be available?

Available on Amazon here. Available globally through Ingram, so hundreds of booksellers around the world (though all in English). On Barnes & Noble here. On Drivethru RPG here.

How about the cover?

Here are the front and back:

What next?

Shoot me a comment here on this article if you’d like to know more or if you’re interested in a review copy.

Since we’re a teensie little indie publisher, it’s super hard to get attention and drum up interest in new products, especially if they’re very different or not related to dungeons. If you’re willing to post something for yourself linking to this announcement, it would be tremendously appreciated!

Every little kind word helps!

*

Anyway, that’s the big announcement. I hope you can feel some of the excitement here on our side. This has been an incredible and life-changing amount of work. It’s nice to start telling people about it.

Till next time,