Progress Report – 8th Feb 2025

Where am I with the progress on Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West?

I’m pretty far. Taking 1522 passages (the length of the previous volume, The Reeking Metropolis) as a target, I have 77% of a draft written. That feels pretty good. I have about 100 loose ends to complete – some of which are single passages to write, and others are entire locations that are currently blank and void. These might take 20 or 30 passages to fill in.

I don’t have to actually complete these passages at this stage before I move on to a whole-text edit. Passages with shops, mechanics and dice rolls will all get edited in a big balancing edit, so if I simply have placeholders for some of these, that’s fine.

When I’ve knotted (loosely or tightly!) all these trailing ends, I’ll also be able to look at what I’ve got and evaluate the content. Have I got a smooth enough entrance – for a first-time player or an experienced reader? Is the current draft too challenging? Is it too hard (like Smog & Ambuscade was, according to feedback) to access good storylines? Is there too much of one type of content? Is the book… too… big to enjoy?

I don’t think it’s too big. But I am feeling stretched in holding all of this in my head. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the major mechanics I use in Steam Highwayman. I’ve jotted this down this morning partly as an aide-memoire to help me when I get to the editing stage, partly to encourage myself about the depth of the content and partly to help me with what I am drafting to fill in gaps. For example, I don’t think I have a doctor in any of the current towns – so popping one into one of the smaller locations in the far west that I have yet to write fills that space up with some good content and supplies healing somewhere for a straight price. There are lots of other places to get healing, when you rest in a room, but these can be unreliable and depend on you buying the right medical items and ideally having a touch of experience yourself. There are three locations in other books where you can pick up medical knowledge, but there needs to be the possibility of gaining it in Princes of the West as well… So I’ll find a small encounter or location to drop it in.

This is the ebb and flow of writing an open-world gamebook. On the one hand, it relies on a deep creativity – I have to be able to create new events and characters quickly – but when I run dry, I can look back at the mechanics and find inspiration there, choosing which one I want to embody in a narrative. It might be a simple one-passage encounter, or it could be a major quest that runs the length of the book. Phew!

Some time into the full edit I will be sharing the draft with several keen readers who are happy to help Steam Highwayman IV be the best it can be – and I’m looking forward to that a lot. I’m pretty confident that it can’t really entirely spoil or kill the experience, as I can set people off looking at individual mechanics or quests, but readers at this stage have got to be the sort who are already house-ruling and reading the adventure for the fun of it, not those who become frustrated with issues! Still, they will have to look critically at the draft and let me know which parts feel sub-par. Do you think that describes you?

It’s been very pleasant to return to writing about the project on here as well. When I was fulfilling The Reeking Metropolis, I had a schedule of posting an update every two weeks, which kept me accountable, kept backers in the loop and motivated me to get the thing done, whatever the challenges! Poor communication is one of the major causes of a loss in confidence in Kickstarter creators, particularly within our gamebook-writing ecosystem, so it’s an easy fix when I enjoy rambling like this and eliciting your ideas too.

And with reference to the image above, it’s one of a series of steampunk etymologies I created a few years ago for instagram or perhaps a printed book. Boilerplate can be derivative, but it can also be serviceable standard material, in the same way that BOG-standard came to be derogatory but intially meant ‘British-or-German’ standard engineering, ie, perfectly good enough and reliable. I imagine that back in the day, ironworks and forges would be churning out boilerplate, as there would always be a call for it. Every industrial process in the world needed a steam boiler, and they needed replacing all the time, or repairing. Quality at volume, once you achieve it, is something to value in itself. Another 30,000 words of similar stuff and we’ll have another book!