I was recently invited to give an interview by email about Steam Highwayman for Duncan Thomson’s Rand Roll site, and it’s just gone up. Some of it is history long-time members will have heard before, but there are a few tidbits about upcoming projects and my writing that might be new to you buried in there. The format was nicely convenient – I was sent questions and had time to respond to them, feeling a bit like writing a post here – and I thought Duncan’s questions intelligent and provocative – in a good way.
So it’s been no surprise to explore his site and discover an absolute wealth of gaming materials. There are his own works – he specialises in random event and encounter tables for tabletop roleplaying games, which can also be found on his Instagram in a handy format. These are really quite fun – each one prompts me to think of ways I could adapt them into gamebook quests.
But he also has a bank of more than 70 interviews with creators and gamers from across a wide swathe of the gaming and rpg community. Remember fantasynamegenerators.com? Interested in city map generators? World map generators? The site is an incredible directory of gaming and writing resources and I’m only just getting into it. I particularly enjoyed reading about Ithai’s work on Hexroll 2 – I used to work with a few hex-based maps and still have a bit of an internal cartographer who works on multiples of 60 degrees.
Duncan came across Steam Highwayman a while ago after rediscovering gamebooks and tracing a path from Legendary Kingdoms to Fabled Lands to my own work. This isn’t the rarest route at the moment: Spidermind’s reach out into the gaming community with their big Kickstarter campaigns has done a lot to expand the gamebook – especially open-world – readership. That said, there’s a lot of risk with expansion at that rate, and it hasn’t been easy for Jon, Oliver and their team to fulfil their promises. New readers come to Steam Highwayman in a trickle, and typically after some other experience of gamebooks – often Fabled Lands, Legendary Kingdoms or even Destiny Quest. The world of tabletop roleplaying games is probably several orders of magnitude greater than the worldwide gamebook community – you’re talking millions of online hobbyists, as opposed to thousands – and there people, not just within solo rpg-ing, who are clearly attracted to what gamebooks offer, so I’m grateful to people like Duncan helping bridge that gap.