Author’s Ideas Blog

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On the Road – Coalgas and Water

In my very first iteration of Steam Highwayman, which was formatted in Twine (and a bad build of which can be found here), I included two trackers that each counted down from 100, subtracting 1 for each passage you read labelled as a location.  They were, of course, the fuel tank and the water tank of your Ferguson, and I hoped that a minor part of your roleplay as a dangerous villain astride a steam-powered machine would be the need to refuel and rewater it.

I’m not pretending that micromanaging a multiplicity of trackers is necessarily a great fit for a gamebook.  A good eurogame with its coloured cubes, or an extended solo roleplay campaign might benefit from them, but there was clearly a tension between needing to track a fuel gauge with its tiny increments and maintaining any kind of narrative flow, so I abandoned a fuel-and-water-tracker when I moved into paper.

The thing is, I’ve always wanted to include it, as the thematic elements are so strong, and the need to have a good supply would clearly be a real restriction on any outlaw trying to survive under the noses of the authorities.  So far, in volumes I-III, I’ve always let the reader assume that this minor matters are entirely under control, a bit like their need to eat or use the toilet.  Such things can make good narrative content, but not necessarily good gameplay.

But recently, as you’ll know if you’re following along, I’ve been thinking about specific and generic journey encounters.  What sort of events, I’ve wondered, should be happening again and again, in an extended campaign, as you ride up and down the roads of Cornwall and Devon?  Bad weather?  Absolutely – that was an easy one.  And then it came to me…  rather than accurately track how far a reader has travelled, as a computer could, this was the place to thematically introduce the need to refuel, or the consequences of running out of water.  This is where the tiny need to refuel or rewater could interrupt, annoy or reward a reader, deepening the simulation and using some of the ideas I had previously.  Some time ago – I think it was in Highways and Holloways – I introduced the customisation of the pump and filter – and there are one-off places to use it.  But it was intended to be something that would allow you to regain water on the move, and now it can.  Likewise, the enlarged fuel tank might help in MOTORING rolls (its main use to date), but it could also extend your range before needing to buy coalgas.  The need to buy coalgas and find water give you more reasons to visit freight yards and forges, more opportunities for conflict and reward.

So I’ve planned out repeating (generic) encounters for low water and a lack of coalgas that can populate the empty roads and journeys.  I’ll need to add a couple of tweaks into the adventure sheet (!), but other than that, the mechanics are all in place.  And hopefully, without becoming boring.

To give you a taste of what it might read like, here is the low-water encounter, formatted in Twine, for old-times sake.

Post-script: The Cubus app of Steam Highwayman: Smog & Ambuscade is in fact written in twine and compiled from there into the very attractive-looking game they produced.  It was the difficulties with exporting a paper gameplay (with its reliance on the reader’s ability to fill in gaps and act in character) back into a digital, computerised format that revealed and created the bugs that plague the app.  One of my long-terms aims is to work with Cubus to squash and fix all those bugs – some of which are minor, but some of which need input from them which is beyond me – and to see the app re-released in a much more playable, rewarding version.

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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!

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READER INPUT WANTED: Fetch Quests in Steam Highwayman IV

An open-world gamebook must contain variety.  If you’re asking your reader to stay with you for hours of gameplay, spread over months of reading, then you have to provide them with short, rewarding actions and longer, more challenging storylines.  I’ve been thinking about this balance in Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West a lot recently, as the length of the book and the number of different things I want to include are both really challenging me.

I have a tendency to inflate even small quests so it’s really important that when I can, I deliver tasty events in as few passages as possible.  This was something I always admired about Fabled Lands, and though I have wanted to create something richer and more atmospheric, I know I can go too far. And if I want to cover the entire map with adventures in around 1500 passages, I need to use them efficiently.

Now one criticism I had of my first gamebook was that there was a reliance on fetch-quests.  Since then I have done my best to avoid using them too much, but I’m coming round again.  There is something steady, predictable and rewarding about completing a simple find-and-deliver, delivering quick success and a boost to the reader’s confidence.  And just because the essential idea is straightforward, doesn’t mean the theme or the manner of the quest has to be…

So I’ve done a bit of work on two types of fetch-quest structures, aiming for the minimum number of passages to make them functional, which means that I can plan to include several in Princes of the West, scattered in among other sorts of quests and missions.

Specific Fetch Quests

The Specific Fetch Quest goes something like this: at Location A, which could be a passage such as an inn parlour or a freight yard, there’s a one-time-only option and an option limited by possession of a certain MacGuffin item.  Choosing the first option introduces you to a character or situation that requires a MacGuffin – you know the sort of valuable and indefinite thing I’m talking about.  A water purification control chip or a pewter falcon or whatever you like.  Perhaps the section includes clues to the MacGuffin’s location, or perhaps it doesn’t.  In the simplest form, you receive an exact location and your job is purely to go and get it, but it with a bit more complexity you can add some detective-work in here.  For example, the quest-giver could give you an approximate location, and you might have to visit several places on a map, or they could tell you that an individual has it, and then you’d have to find that person first.  Either way, a Codeword or a unique item acts as the key to obtain the MacGuffin when you eventually reach Location B.  There a conditional option gets you what you’re looking for, strips you of the Codeword or unique item and sends you back on your way to Location A to hand it over – this time using the second option.

Now the elegance here is in the minimal use of conditions.  Because the first option at Location A is one-time-only, so is the unique item, which effectively makes the conditional option at Location B also one-time only and the second option at Location A one-time-only.  This little fetch-quest needs only 3 passages, one tick-box and two unique items to function.  Nice.

Generic Fetch Quests

Now here’s something even simpler: a Generic Fetch Quest.  Presuming you use pre-existing locations, this only requires two passages and no unique items.  The idea here is that at a location such a market or roadside, you are commissioned to fetch an item – probably something with a bit of rarity to it, but it could be something relatively easy to find.  A tin of fruit or a fur coat or a boondoggle that could be bought at a market at a bit of a distance – not next-door.  Within passage QF2.1, a condition like “If you possess a boondoggle, turn to 801 immediately” responds to your solution of the quest and sends you to a reward passage.  This sort of fetch quest can be repeated over and over – which is more likely to be a problem than a benefit, but which can have uses.  For example, a Devon shopkeeper could tell you of his need to get hold of Cornish clotted cream for a specific customer, meaning that whenever you cross the Tamar, you might bring a pot with you and drop it off for a nice little illegal profit – such contraband being forbidden by Imperial edict, you see.  Perhaps this is prone to spamming, but if a reader is willing to leave all their possessions in a hollow tree or pub bedroom somewhere and fill their saddlebags with clotted cream, I think they probably deserve a multiple reward.

Rewards

And that is really the next part of the equation.  A reward for a specific quest is easier to invent: it could be a valuable item (clearly worth more than the effort of fetching the MacGuffin) or cash, or possibly even something more important like the Friendship of a character, access to further missions or locations, a stat-increase, a modification to your velosteam…  The list goes on. 

When creating something repeatable, it really is tricky not to mess this up.  The net gain has to be valuable enough to satisfy the reader but not so valuable as to break the game.  Sometimes I like a random table here: one time you might get given £2 in coin, but another time it might be a gold necklace, technically worth more but more bothersome as you have to find someone who will fence it for you – which is not that easy in Princes of the West. And how many are too many?  I have something like 120 locations in the current Steam Highwayman volume and really, every single one needs something interesting to happen there – either a mechanic like a repeatable ambush, a quest beginning, middle or end, or a minor encounter.  Empty locations are simply a waste of everyone’s time.  Right now I am actually struggling just to keep on top of what I have written, so I can’t tell you how many simple or complex fetch quests I actually have in Princes of the West. I’ll have to get back to you.

Now I’m pretty sure you have feelings about this style of quest, or the conditional structures I’ve drawn out about, or experiences in the earlier Steam Highwayman volumes that annoyed or pleased you. Perhaps you’ve got a better way of doing things or an idea to improve what I’ve written above.

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READER INPUT WANTED – Journey encounter mechanics in Steam Highwayman

Roleplaying as the Steam Highwayman is all about being on the road, exploring and encountering, and happening upon opportunities.  One way I’ve achieved this in the first three books is by placing uni-directional journey passages between locations – they show up orange on the map above. I stole this technique from Fabled Lands, of course, where they are particularly used in Cities of Gold and Glory and Over the Blood-Dark Sea.  These journeys achieve a couple of things: they can slow your passage through the world, for good or bad, and they can be an opportunity for unplanned roadside encounters. They typically look like this:

Up until now, I’ve relied upon a mechanic I inherited from Fabled Lands – the random encounter table, which usually looks a bit like type A.  If each encounter is unique to the location, then after experiencing it, a fixed link can redirect the reader to the eventual destination (which in this case would be passage 233), but since Highways & Holloways I’ve used generic, repeatable encounters, such as bad weather, which can be met in different locations.  These need the reader to note which passage they will eventually be spat out at when they follow the instruction ‘turn to your noted passage’.

The main benefit of the random table is that you can’t really know what is going to happen on any given journey.  But I’ve come to wonder if this unpredictability is less of a benefit than I originally thought. So type B shows an alternative.

Downsides to this style include the duplication of links – 233 gets mentioned four times here, which isn’t elegant.  I could replace each mention after the first with ‘noted passage’, but that’s also rather clunky and a bit of a typographic challenge.  See type C below.

The mechanic used in B and C is a tick-box list.  For better or worse, the reader must pass through the events on this journey in sequence: the first time they steam this way, they will meet the seven sisters.  On their second journey, they will proceed directly to 233.  On the third, they will encounter rain (a generic passage that has minor consequences).  Only on their fifth travel along this road will they talk to the boy with the broken basket.

Upsides: no annoying dice that stubbornly refuse you to access an event you haven’t been to.  Also, there is no need to use a tickbox within an encounter to make it a one-time event, which always feels like a cheat to me.

Downsides: duplication, predictability and writing in the book.  A player who knows that travelling down a certain road might trigger a rainstorm might avoid it – and then again, they might forget exactly when.  Also, for the sizeable minority who dislike writing in their book, this list has to be exported elsewhere, eg into a new companion. And if you re-play the entire game, it’s another set of tickboxes to erase…

After five journeys down this road, the passage becomes effectively useless – but perhaps that was the case with the random table anyway?  Are my readers that keen to re-play minor encounters without a differing outcome? In a book as large as a volume of Steam Highwayman, how long is it before someone re-rides or exhausts one of these journeys anyway?

I’m really interested to see what you all think about these two (relatively minor) mechanics, and whether there are strong preferences.  Perhaps you have another system entirely to suggest?  I’m unlikely to entirely switch over from type A to type B, but with almost 50 unidirectional journey passages in Steam Highwayman: The Princes of the West, I want to eliminate anything that really annoys a majority of readers.  I’m actually thinking increasingly hard about my gameplay design, which I know isn’t perfect, and I’ll be posting some more issues like this in the future.

And if you’re really interested in thinking about random event tables and their use in tabletop rpgs, do take a look at Duncan Thomson’s https://www.randroll.com/. They get a lot more complicated than my simple ones here, and he has a huge wealth of content. Need a table to generate a fantasy encounter for sailing the open sea? Or a list of 100 winter-themed trinkets? Off you go.

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What makes an author?

I filled my second planning book for Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West last week. Broaching a new notebook is a lovely feeling, isn’t it? So I’ve included a shot what my plans currently look like here – illustrating the 79th quest, the Smugglers of Appledore.

It’s hard work, frankly. I’ve reached around 1100 passages (something like 130k words in total) but normally only get one or two good writing sessions in a week. It would be great to ignore all my responsibilities and simply focus on the book, but I’d end up very hungry, with a sad wife and three crying children…

So I have to slog on! When asked by a young fan recently about the skills needed to be an author, I was able to quickly answer – patience! Determination! Self-confidence! I didn’t say anything about spelling or word choices… In fact, writing a gamebook series is a very skill-heavy task – you need a wide range of skills – but right now, it’s the ability to keep going that is of most use.

This chart shows you where I am with the draft. The big recent drop was me taking the hard decision to remove the sea… The Steam Highwayman will still be able to be a smuggler, but largely by moving things around on land and participating in one-off missions over the sea, rather than having a large sandbox sea module. I would simply have bloated the book beyond what I can be sure I’d finish.

That said, I recognise I have far more stamina for a project of this scale than I used to. I get tired after three hours of planning and writing, sure, but I know I can keep going and would be happier doing more sessions in a week. At this stage of working on my first book, I collapsed and gave in, said ‘It’s good enough!’ and prepared to publish. This time I can’t afford to do that: I want to do justice to the subject, to my readers who are expecting a really quality adventure, and to myself. I’ve got a lot better at writing mechanics and gameplay, and I want to edit and playtest this volume far more carefully than the previous ones.

So since I will be taking some time off with my family over the next months, it looks like it won’t be early in 2025 that I manage to Kickstart Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. Patience and determination needed all round: if your PATIENCE is 14 or higher (adding 1 if you possess another open-world gamebook series), then turn to 2025…

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Sink the Camphausen!

Inspiration comes from many directions and sometimes it comes direct from my readers. Acknowledgement is due here to Mr Alan Sennet and his fevered brain.

Today I passed another milestone – 1000 complete passages of Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. It’ll be a great adventure, although wetter than the first three. No energy to say anything else – it’s been a 4000 word day.

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Toothy Braddock’s Gold

I wrote the first part of this quest around seven years ago, in Steam Highwayman: Smog & Ambuscade. Did I then dream how long it would take me to write the conclusion? Far from it! The original plan was to write a book every six months and complete the series in three years…

I maintain that I could keep to that speed if I didn’t have to earn a living in other ways. Over those seven years, there have been periods of full-time teaching, part-time teaching and supply work at three different schools. Most recently, I’ve been working part-time for my church, as well as providing personal tutoring for 11+ and GCSE students locally. I was actually doing that in 2017 as well!

And what a lot of other water has flowed under the bridge of my life. In 2017 I was recently-married, but childless. Now my wife and I have a full house of noisy, needy youngsters aged 1, 3 and 5.

Yet I still dream of hidden treasure… There are a few people to blame for that: Robert Louis Stevenson, clearly, but also Enid Blyton, who wasn’t above stashing a box of jewels, coins or contraband in the occasional cave, ruin, castle, boat cabinet, hollow tree etc. This weekend my daughter began reading The Castle of Adventure and, besides the paternal pride of seeing my own child keen and able to read ‘chapter books’, I smelled the wind of a whole new mode of life… She is now old enough for book recommendations – and that means, for the shaping of her mind through stories she can read for herself.

I’m off to the bookshop.

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You old rogue, you.

Go on, Steam Highwayman. That’s what you’re all about.

Today I’ve been working on the main quests – more about those soon! But to fill up time I’ve just been ‘colouring in’ a few of the many ambushes in Princes of the West. There are so many rich people to rob and so many poor ones to help: sometimes, the simplest actions are the most Steam Highwayman-ish.

Today’s count: 901 passages complete (95525 words), 31 passages written today (4506 words), 2152 links in total so far.

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Thirsty workers

A good mechanic – as everyone knows – is worth their weight in gold. For a while I’ve had this idea that the Steam Highwayman will need to carry liquor about on the back of the Ferguson, and even planned in the barrel panniers as another customisation. But rather than simply add them as a dryly purchasable option at some Freight Yard, I’ve made a little feature out of getting them fitted.

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Barrels of trouble in Princes of the West

It was great to be at Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 at the weekend: there’s nothing so galvanising as spending time with fans of Steam Highwayman and other gamebook writers. My daughter is also back to school, so I’ve returned to my library-visiting schedule, which is the most productive writing pattern I’ve found for some time. And today, for some reason not entirely clear to me, I’ve latched onto the liquor smuggling system within Princes of the West.

This is one of several systems that are almost independent of the main quests, but could still prove to be quite a satisfying part of the gameplay. You’ll need to get some barrel panniers fitted to your velosteam (not sure where yet), and then source liquor, either directly from a hidden distillery, from smugglers bringing it ashore, or by smuggling it across the sea yourself. Maybe you’ll need a safe seaside cave to stash that in… But once you have a couple of firkins (that’s a nine-gallon barrel) strapped to the Ferguson, you should be able to find a willing customers. Cornwall will pay you a fair price, but should you manage to get it across the border into Devon, then you might have the beginnings of a very lucrative scheme. Just be cautious about whom you approach… The bounty on smugglers is worth more to some landlords than the potential profit of undutied brandy.