science fiction

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,

Bad graphic design and an unfortunate addiction to lore-dumps

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Last week, I told you about some questionable art decisions I made in the development of Grailrunner’s Salt Mystic tabletop skirmish game. That wasn’t my favorite thing to do, re-examining art I felt really great about back in the day but which hasn’t stood the test of five years of studying, getting critiqued, and practicing. In that case, I told you about my obsession then with the Blender 3d graphics software and a workflow involving Daz Studio and Substance Painter with Photoshop finishing.

Basically, I was doing things because I’d learned how to do them and thought they were cool rather than because they were the right tools for the job.

Anyway, I’m just waiting on final proofs now for the revitalized Salt Mystic starter set and thought it would be interesting and informative for anyone out there intrigued by indie game design to hear some things I learned from designing, playtesting, and managing art direction and graphic design on a tabletop game.

Sound okay?

Cut to the chase – what’s the biggest lesson you learned?

Graphic design isn’t about making something look cool. It’s about communicating visually. That sounds nice and plain vanilla but I’m telling you that it’s crucial. It’s everything.

Let’s talk about the original rulebook. Here’s the cover design I commissioned from a wonderful artist named Omer Tunc:

I am entirely responsible for the art direction: the composition itself, the text and placement of it, even the lighting. He did what I asked. Grailrunner hadn’t yet put out Salt Mystic: Book of Lots to define the world’s lore and setting and I had all these amazing weapons, vehicles, creatures and people I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about. Let’s call it Founder’s Disease where you’re carried away with your own ideas and can’t throttle them down, even shoving them at a saturated audience who don’t have a reason to care yet.

What’s the matter with it?

It doesn’t clearly communicate anything, really. That’s supposed to be an underground dimensional gate to a pocket world showing a plasma gunslinger adventurer about to step down inside. But you’d never know that as it isn’t immediately relatable or recognizable as such. And it communicates precisely nothing at all about this game, major dynamics that make it unique, or even that it is a game. And this game doesn’t even emphasize exploration – it’s a wargame!

In fact, I included the sourcebook because my Founder’s Disease took over my soul and forced me to spend weeks on the art and copy to provide the mother of all lore dumps in hopes of people with wandering imaginations caring and immersing themselves in this setting. That’s a key dynamic of the game in fact, to craft a narrative for the battle using battlefield dynamics and the cards and tell a story immersively with the game’s rules. My thinking at the time was to provide the raw materials with the sourcebook so people could do that.

Yet this cover focuses on a purple-blue scene that fails to ring any recognizable bells. I gave no resonant hook and trusted to curious, imaginative people to dig inside and get excited on their own.

I see what you mean. How’d you fix that?

The original Sourcebook and Core Rules was a paid product for the last five years. I remain incredibly proud of the work that I and some very special people put into that. It just needed to come off the market and be replaced by something that knew what it was trying to do and focused on doing it.

Download the new rulebook

I requested critiques pretty much page by page this time and the overwhelming direction was to simplify and streamline information. Every time I thought I was leaving too much out, I was told to strip out more. Leave white space. Let the eye breathe. It’s better to have another page that’s clean and readable than a cramped one. Just communicate what the game is, why someone would care, and simply how to play. Show examples.

How did you handle the art, then?

I’ve got four art pieces in the rulebook.

The cover is designed to do one thing and do it with emphasis: show a ball lightning carbine duel. It’s a core combat mechanism in this setting, involving a forearm-mounted weapon that fires ball lightning but can also be used to deflect incoming fire. This art hopefully looks cool too, but it exists to communicate that.

Inspiration for the composition was the original 1990 cover of Mars: The Red Planet by Mick Farren. The artist was David Schleinkofer.

What I couldn’t resolve visually for myself until I saw Schleinkofer’s piece here was how to cleanly show two guys gunfighting without a flat side-by-side scene.

What he did in this piece blew my mind, honestly. I can’t say enough about the idea of the larger, looming figure up front and how readable it is what he’ll be reaching for. The tension. The depth. The overall mood.

Just fantastic.

The other art pieces we included were similarly added for specific reasons. A distinctive vehicle used in this setting uses a vortex engine and articulated mechanical legs, able to ride up vertical walls. We included a splash page showing that to quickly communicate there is more to the combat mechanics in this game than two guys blasting each other with lightning.

We included another splash page to introduce the Towerlock scenario included with the rulebook to get a player started. In that case, the image exists to communicate the distinctive nature of the battlefields in this game and how they can be much more than a flat pieces of ground with a hill on it. The reader sees dudes and a robot climbing up a mountain face in combat and has learned something quickly and instinctively about what they’re about to see in the suggested game play.

The final splash page is a character scene showing this isn’t a dueling game but rather has multiple fighters in combat simultaneously. That one closes out the rulebook.

What did you learn designing the game packaging?

Take a look at the header image for this article. That two-deck starter set on the left was the very first offering for Salt Mystic made available back in 2020, maybe early 2021. I remember being so excited that I’d figured out how to make rust in Substance Painter that I jumped up from a hotel bed to sit down at the laptop again after midnight and genned up that cover image of the two war marshals.

I put rust all over the packaging because I thought it made the box look like metal and industrial, not because it said anything about the game or the setting. Instead, it looks brown and ugly. The overall design of the side-by-side decks with a rules pamphlet inside was way too expensive for what I was offering. I couldn’t make money selling that and it didn’t look as great as it did in my head.

What did you change?

Somewhere, I came across this packaging for The Witcher: Old World and thought it was beautiful. I’m an unfortunate fan of wrap-around imagery like this and felt this was sophisticated, atmospheric, and a good model for the packaging improvement I wanted to make. This was my inspiration for whatever I was going to do.

I hired a Lithuanian artist named Roman on Fiverr to design two tuck boxes for me, one for each of the two initial factions. I provided some inspiration art and thorough briefs, and I may have even showed him this Witcher packaging. He did what I asked, so remember that. I had in mind the idea of Magic: The Gathering offering dedicated card decks for a Plainswalker and thought my war marshals might be interesting sold that way since I was planning to generate another five or six factions at least.

There’s the wrap-around imagery and the individual decks for war marshals. Their names were supposed to be intriguing, their facial expressions eye-catching. The tech and cityscape behind them was supposed to draw you in to wonder at the worlds they came from.

Instead, I believe these designs don’t communicate much at all that is really important. I’ve learned that imagery like this isn’t immediately relatable, doesn’t sell anything distinctive about the game mechanics, and doesn’t distinguish it from anything else on the shelf beside it.

The revitalized Salt Mystic is a balanced starter set, not including the kitchen sink like before, designed with exactly what a player would need to get started. The rulebook is accessible via a QR code or URL. Much more details on the game on the back, including hooks but also with player count, age, and contents included to smooth the buying decision and set expectations.

This set includes terrain cards and a starter scenario as well as measuring cards if needed. All you need is dice. It’s just a simpler ramp for onboarding into the game. The QR code leads straight to the same cover image to avoid disorientation.

I mean, that’s the challenge, isn’t it? This template is what I had – a crazy-looking blob of lines that I had to print off, cut with scissors, and ask my wife to help me fold into the box itself so I could label for myself what faces were where to make sense of how to fit the artwork onto it. Tuck box design isn’t for chumps, I can tell you that.

*

But anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope it was as interesting to hear about as it was to live. Wish us luck on the revitalized game and positioning. It’s exciting to see this thing culminate after so many years.

Till next time,

Rendel’s Vengeance: A New Salt Mystic Illustrated Adventure (FREE)

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Enter a derelict flying oriel with Cain Blackwick in Rendel’s Vengeance, a new illustrated Salt Mystic science-fantasy adventure. Available for free now in the Story Arcade.

Life got in the way and we’ve not published a Story Arcade lore card in a while. It’s been bugging me that I need to get back into the habit of building out the Salt Mystic world with these immersive little one-shot illustrated flash fiction pieces. People seem to like them, and it’s one way to help on-board people to something I pour so much of my heart into.

To see what’s there on the Story Arcade already, smash the Explore Now button below:

But anyway, I recently took a dive into the Salt Mystic: Book of Lots to do a little solo roleplaying excursion and summoned a fun (and to me, hilarious) story of adventure and exploration that surprised me in its twists and ending. Crazy how roleplaying oracles do that – just flipping pages and answering questions, the occasional crazy decision to see what happens – and BOOM! Adventure!

We put together a new lore card with the illustrations and text of the adventure to store forever in the Story Arcade, and this is possibly something new we’ll do occasionally with that growing library, depending on how you guys feel about it. As always, these are one-page tales set in the Salt Mystic universe and something you can read in less than five minutes.

Click the page below to go straight to the new lore card:

That’s the news today. Feel free to peruse whichever lore card’s teaser or artwork draw your attention and let us know what you thought.

Till next time,

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.

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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…

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I hope some of this was helpful or at least entertaining. Warts and all, this is how things have gone so far and the plan going forward. I’m sure the outside observer can find all manner of beasties and stinking swamps herein, but from the inside, it’s a wild, crazy bucking bronco we’re just happy to hold onto!

Till next time,