Home of the Steam Highwayman
May will be Steam Highwayman playthrough month in the 100 Endings Book Club, hosted by Duncan Thomson of Rand Roll.
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Yes, the Adventurer’s Logs have been printed – and delivered! Just not to me… yet.
I took my family away for a break at my in-laws’ caravan for a week, and while we were here Solopress delivered 300 copies of the Adventurer’s Log to my flat back in London. I’m keen to get back and take a look at them – but not keen enough to cut short the much-needed family break.
The booklets were actually meant to arrive last week before we left, but the delivery company struggled to understand some crucial part of their role, ie their responsibility to actually leave the boxes at our flat, rather than return with them to their depot. Who knows what was going on there!
In the meantime, I have to praise and thank the committed team of playtesters and proofreaders who have been trawling through Princes of the West on all our behalf. I’m rather humbled by this attention to my work and we’ve logged a large number of small issues for me to resolve. Thankfully this looks like the major gameplay is working and coherent and the vast majority of corrections are typos and tiny formatting issues.
I haven’t had as much time as I hoped to put into the project from my side, but I have been working on Harvest of Death, drafting on Twine for the first time in several years. The limit on me here has been family responsibility: as well as the break, we’ve had a brief hospital visit, a heavy cold and concomitant broken sleep. Those of you with toddlers, or who remember such a time, know exactly how debilitating that can be!
But I’ve also had chance to interact with the wider gamebook community in the last few weeks, playtesting an interesting take on the open-world gamebook structure by a backer and dipping into a couple of other books I’ve received and not had time to look at. Oh, and concluding my playthrough of Fabled Lands for the March section of the 100 Endings Book Club. And booking my place at Fighting Fantasy Fest 6, which has been announced for September 5 in West London.
Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for a while! It looks like I’ll be able to fulfil the project and ship rewards around August time – a little after my initial plan, but not too long. But for anyone attending Fighting Fantasy Fest, I’ll be able to offer a collection option for their rewards, eliminating postage costs – good for your wallets and streamlining admin for me. I suppose I can also offer collection for anyone else willing to travel to East London where I live if they’re not attending the convention – I know a few people online have already mentioned clashes – but it looks like this might come together well.
If you’re not coming to the convention, I intend to publish shipping options in a couple of month’s time, giving you each a tracked and a budget-friendly option, as far as I’m able. I’m still working on these and the prices will depend on the final size of all the packages – but it won’t be a lot longer now.
In this next fortnight I’ll be continuing to work on Harvest of Death as well as pressing on with the maps, guide booklet and updating the player companion.
Next update due: 24.4.26
On Tuesday morning I ordered three hundred copies of the Adventurer’s Logbook with my printer. That feels great. To know that one of the many components of the rewards is complete and will soon be in my hands is a big relief – it feels like I am on the downhill slope at last.
It was a lot of fun to create. Time-consuming, yes, but it meant that I got to skim through all four of my books and check that my notes were accurate, meaning that within the last two or three weeks, I have effectively filled my head with every single Steam Highwayman achievement and escapade – and it makes me very glad and proud. Sorry, perhaps, that almost ten years’ work can be read in a fortnight, but happy with the quality.
Although I produced hint sequences for the most of Highways and Holloways, there wasn’t space to include this amount of content in the logbook. I’ll release these digitally later, rather like the 94 things to do in Smog and Ambuscade I created a while ago. This was also taking a lot of time, so I haven’t yet created full hint sequences for The Reeking Metropolis or Princes of the West.
Still, I was able to grade each achievement on its complexity – largely to do with how many dice rolls or unique items are needed to achieve each one. A simple system of stars indicates each achievement’s difficulty.
After finishing, I edited some typos and made some corrections to Princes of the West that I had found as I read through it. The team of proofreaders and playtesters are doing a fab job – thankyou to each of you reading this – and in a few weeks I’ll be collating everything and doing a final edit.
I began editing the Players Companion to update it to include the write-in information for Princes of the West. There’s a lot! So far I’ve begun by listing codewords and possession boxes – of which there are around thirty.
So what next? I mean to continue editing the Companion, hopefully finishing that by next update, together with working on the maps and guidebook. I might even get to Harvest of Death.
This update is early because I really mean to be offline tomorrow! It’s been a mega-busy week and today took the biscuit, so I don’t want to have any jobs on my plate when I (eventually) get up tomorrow morning.
Next update due: 10.4.26
We have a team of around fifteen keen playtesters and proofreaders currently at work, already exploring Devon and Cornwall through the passages of Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. It was a great feeling to have other eyes – and enthusiastic ones at that – on the text again, after many months of solo endeavour.
What’s the point? Well, along with getting some feedback on macro gameplay like difficulty and pacing, I hope to squash as many of these as possible…
The dreaded broken link – every gamebook enthusiast’s nightmare. In a book of 2251 passages with almost 10,000 links, there is a lot of opportunity for mistakes.
The proofing and playtesting window is two months, which gives me time to work on all the other parts of your reward bundle. This week I have been working on the Adventurer’s Logbook…
That means revisiting Highways and Holloways and writing out a Hints and Achievements list like I did for Smog and Ambuscade. It’s not a quick job but it’s very enjoyable – I get to enjoy reading all the quests I wrote in 2018, many of which I’ve forgotten. I mean to do something better than a simple printed list – perhaps a table layout for one or more dates or ticks to say, yes, I achieved this on this date during my fourth playthrough or something… It’s not quite certain yet. For the sake of originality, I was looking at a fun paper size (eg long and slim, like DL) and maybe ringbound, but due to cost of both postage and printing, I’m more likely to go for a stapled A5 booklet at the moment. But we’ll see.
Perhaps something like this – this was the DL layout. Either way, the list of achievements is a great way to advertise the book. What can you do in a Steam Highwayman adventure? A lot more than defeat some fantasy monsters, rob a dungeon and defeat a wizard, that’s for sure, in both variety and length. These lists of achievements don’t tell the whole story of the adventures in the books – both the prose and the gameplay are needed for that – but they give a great flavour.
What next? In the next fortnight I mean to…
And that will be plenty to get done!
Next update due: 27.3.26
Since the last update I completed the formatting of the interior of the book. It is a whopper – currently at 2251 sections and 426 pages. This took me so long for a couple of reasons:
– To maintain consistency, I’m using the same format and software as for the previous Steam Highwayman books. These were completed on a copy of Microsoft Publisher 2007 on a laptop belonging to my wife that was bought in either 2007 or 2008… Once I’m into the swing of things, there are no problems with memory, but I have to treat it fairly carefully to avoid crashes, battery issues and so on!
– I also go through each page manually, editing the layout of the options, spacing the passages in the columns and choosing and fitting spot illustrations (some call them ‘fillers’ but Russ always called them ‘spots’) to make up the space and break up the wall of text. This is also a chance to edit and improve, either editing my writing or fixing links, filling in the shops and changing values for balance. To complete the 2251 passages, this took around 10 days – something like 60 hours.
What then? I have made a first stab at a new Character Sheet (or 3 sheets including the Devon Music Tour) to account for some changes in mechanics. These are still not finalised. Then I looked at refreshing the introduction and rules, but, to be honest, I was pretty frazzled by that stage! These rules may need a bit more attention – and also some inputs.
One of the particular inputs I am thinking about is the fight rules. I have two alternate fight systems – smalls changes to the essential rules – worked out with help from a backer who knows these books almost as well as I do – and I’m intending to share them with you and with anyone who wants to playtest, to see whether they actually improve the gameplay.
So my plan is to share the electronic interior of the book with any of you who want to proof it or playtest it – in fact, you should have already had my invitation to participate by email, and if not, please check your spam… This leaves a lot still to do, but it means I can shift mode away from the very focussed writing, editing and formatting into the production of some of the other rewards. Specifically, I will take a look at the large maps and get them printed as the next phase of the project. They take a long time to fold, so the sooner I have them, the better! Then I’ll move on to look at the logbook and a refreshed Companion, and also find time to produce the Harvest of Death and Dark, Satanic Mills that I promised you.
I also get to do some drawing – like the image of the Red Tiller above – perhaps reminiscent of the Blue Anchor in Helston?
Exciting times!
Next update due: 13.3.26
I’ve managed to work three long days in the last fortnight – last Tuesday and then this Monday and Tuesday just past. That put the formatted document of The Princes of the West at around 70% complete: I have reached passage 1500 and there are not yet 300 pages.
During the process of pasting in the 800 or so passages, I’ve made countless small edits. Some are responses to comments made by two of you – Andreas and Oliver – from as long as a year ago. Some are edits to systems that I intended to fix months ago and left hanging. For example, as I have reached each beer passage, I’ve checked the possible rumours against a long list. The list was originally thirty rumours long, but when I wrote the smuggling module, I had to include another twenty or so rumours. These needed dropping into the most-appropriate pubs – and logging, so that each was hearable the right number of times – normally in two or three different pubs.
I even invented a new item (something I really try not to do any more) to help give colour to the velosteam repair system, which has felt a bit repetitive. But the rarer or top-level engineering components were too tricky to get hold of – the titanium alloy particularly – and I wanted to create something that could be bought in a workshop of forge, so that mending your own velosteam was once again the cheaper option.
But today I’ve just sat down (7:37pm) to write this update for you. My eldest three are in bed (wait – Emmanuel has just returned to the living room and is swaying towards me without looking me in the eye – he is hoping I will let him lie down on the sofa) – and the baby is with Cheryl getting to sleep. Today I have done my best not to think about being productive at all.
I’m trying to re-learn how to sabbath!
On a Friday? Some of you might ask. Or, what’s that? I’m trying to take one day in seven off – a day without work. After all, if it worked for Almighty God, it should work for me. But the challenge for me is that a Sunday is typically a work day – I might rise at five, finish preparing a sermon before breakfast, feed the family, help get the children ready, travel to church, prepare for the service, run the service, preach, pray with and for church members or visitors for a couple of hours after church and then close up (if it’s my turn) around three or four in the afternoon. We typically head over to my inlaws’ house then for some child-friendly tv and a family meal.
My Saturdays often include planned activities or jobs to do as well, so Friday has become the day when I can permit myself to achieve nothing – that’s the key. To tell myself that it is alright if, one day in the week, I aim to get nothing done. I might still prepare three meals (as lightly as I can!), change six or seven nappies, but if I limit the housework to ‘fill and turn on the dishwasher’, then I can both enjoy being with my family and even get some relaxation time for myself. Which today meant enjoying a couple of glasses of merlot, playing my new 12-string guitar (a gift from the church for my recent 40th birthday), a lot of lego with the boys, lots of cuddles and stretches with Raphael, my youngest, who is learning to take steps, and enjoying a good book.
Another birthday present (along with the wine and the guitar) was a book voucher. I headed to Foyles in Charing Cross on Saturday – a rainy, tourist-thronged afternoon – and bought a copy of the Stranger Things Choose Your Own Adventure, which has already disappointed me (although I’m new to the franchise) and something far more predictably pleasurable – a volume of Ursula K Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, called Orsinia: Revolution is in the Air.
Now Ursula is a bit of a friend of mine. A one-sided friendship, perhaps, but I enjoy her company enough to re-read everything I have by her. I have a bruised copy of The Dispossessed with a letter from a good friend folded into it after I lent it to him twenty years ago (it came back about a year later) and I have a school paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea and I have a hardback copy of Tales from Earthsea that I began transliterating into the feanorian tengwar in coloured ink, right on the page, and a Gollancz paperback of Always Coming Home, which reads to me like a dream I might have had.
I wasn’t really aware of Orsinia, although as soon as I saw the title I recognised that China Mieville probably was when writing about the third city in The City and the City. And I’m about four-fifths of the way through the novel, Malafrena, which is the first part of the collection. It reads a lot like The Dispossessed, but set in a fictional nineteenth-century central Europe – in a sort of Ruritanian cardboard kingdom that the Steam Highwayman is on the very cusp of taking a flight to. In fact, I have felt like I am reading set in my own ‘world that never was but should have been’. There isn’t really much steampunk in Orsinia, but it has all the ingredients, just as my world has – social inequality, rural and urban tensions, industrial revolution, a growing labour movement, high society, free agent adventurers…
Cheryl asked me how I was finding it. I said, a bit slow, and it is. The first fifth of the book is the coming-of-age for three cousins of the rural gentry – it reminded me quite a lot of Tolstoy – and a large part of the book is relationships, rather than directly-propounded philosophy or social ideation, like The Dispossessed. But slow is exactly what I’ve needed – although I read quickly – because it means my mind is resting, having to focus on descriptions of rural life or quasi-european court social interactions, because if I were to skip on until the action, I would be writing off a very large amount of the book.
I do wonder who else has read it. Any of you out there? Anyone fancy a try after this strange recommendation?
I intend to finish the paste-up by my next update. I won’t be on schedule to fulfil by end of February, but I think I will be able to share an electronic version with keen proof-readers and playtesters. Watch your inboxes!
By next update I intend to:
– finish formatting passages 1501-2263
– complete the introduction, together with rules for new systems
– complete the end paratexts – adventure sheet, beer list, Devon music tour, codeword list etc
Next update due: 27.2.26
January has shot by – and progress is good.
– I paid Ben for the finalised internal illustrations. I’m now only holding funds for the printing of the books and the extras.
– I’ve spent four days and several late-night stints formatting the book – so far, I’m up to passage 722. This is essentially a long, careful paste-up, as I take sections of 100 passages from my gdoc and paste them into Microsoft publisher, and then work through them in order, checking lineation, reformatting bold and italic fonts, which I use a lot, adding in a lot of invisible tables and setting in the minor and major illustrations. I think I’m now about ⅓ of the way through this long and painstaking job.
– Rather than correct the rumour engine from the outside, I’ve been correcting it as I go through the formatting: each time I reach a beer or other rumour passage, I can select which of the rumours to link in from a list of nearly 60.
– Likewise, as I’ve reached shops and places to trade, I’ve logged the items to be bought and sold so that everything needed can be accessed somewhere. Prices are high in parts of Cornwall, cut off behind the Imperial blockade – but there’s money to be made if you know where to offload your loot!
– I’ve checked the codewords to passage 700, but there are more to do.
– I’ve checked the inter-book links and written a missing link that takes you on a railway journey to London.
The plan is to continue working at this pace until the book is formatted. It’s taking longer than I had hoped because the book is … longer than expected.
But being so careful as I go does have the benefit of giving me the chance to comb my way through the passages. I’ve made plenty of corrections as I’ve gone along – typos, bad links, duplications and so on – but also edited and improved the clarity of the writing in some places and, I think, improved the game in a few minor ways.
It’s been pleasant to re-read sections that I wrote a long time ago and enjoy the story from the inside as well. There is a broad distribution of sections across the map too – passage 300-399 in one area and 400-499 in another – so it’s a bit like travelling across the region as well. Coupled with memories from our trip to Cornwall and Devon in September, I’ve really been in the saddle in my mind.
What next?
– I’ll be continuing to format the document! This is probably another 10 days work – so it may be March before I’m ready to send or share it with proofreaders.
Next update due: 13.2.26
A happy new year to each of you faithful backers! Thanks for your support and patience through 2025 🙂 Here’s a New Year and an approaching end to this project. What have I done and what is still to do?
Since last update, I:
– recovered from the flu. Thanks for all the messages of sympathy and support, the prayer and wishes for our recovery.
– completed the massive item survey which lists every instance of each item used in Princes of the West. There are 321 unique items so far in the series and keeping them in order is an ever-growing challenge! Some are one-use quest items, gained in a single location and tied to a specific event, while others are useful for both quests and trade, can be collected in different places and have importance differences in prices or availability tied to the story of your adventure. I have tried not to bloat the book with more stuff for the sake of it, but a certain amount of crucially Cornish and Devonian content has crept in…
– completed two black-and-white internal maps for the book. These are adapted from the large map that flew as a background in the adverts and videos for my Kickstarter, but it has taken some time to get them right. It goes like this.
Every gamebook needs a map, but an open-world gamebook needs one even more. While I, the author, know exactly where I am at any given time, feedback from readers tells me that navigating the world of Steam Highwayman is both challenging and rewarding – but certainly a big job. Very well. That means that a map has to be clear and unambiguous.
A black-and-white version of the large map (which is not completely finished) would be hard to read – least of all, due to the need to shrink it. In fact, the shape of Devon and Cornwall is also an issue – I struggled for a long while before landing on the current solution – which is an idiosyncratic re-arrangement of the Cornish peninsula, proudly skewiff. I hope it doesn’t end up being too confusing to navigate with.
I took the outline from the big map, chopped it up, relabelled the towns and other crucial locations and then sent it back over to the ipad for bordering… Then I did the same for Devon, which didn’t need spinning by 45 degrees and added in a few scrawled notes for flavour.
I think they are what I need. Legibility is key – a map that fits on a 10” x 8” page simply can’t hold as much as a big A2 spread – and that means that there is certainly a benefit to ordering the big maps beside their beauty. Some more playtesting will, I hope, reveal whether there are other changes that need to be made or more information that should best be added.
– completed a skill survey to see which attributes are tested most frequently and to try to balance their difficulty. This is not my speciality but I have had some good advice in the past which is getting baked into this stage.
– fitted and formatted the first 50 passages into the document that will produce our print copies of Princes of the West. This means fiddling with all the margins, the arrangements for tables in shops, dice rolls and other options, ordering the early pages for the introductions and maps and getting it ready to import the other 2200 or so passages.
That brings me to a couple of things I need to tell you! Firstly – the book is going to be bigger than expected. Probably nearer 400 pages than 300… The increase in print cost is covered by your pledges and the contingency built into the funding, but it might make some of the postage costs increase. I’m looking into this.
Secondly, I’m several months behind where I had hoped to be. I could rush and try to get the books to you by the end of February or March, but it is very likely that they will contain errors that we will all regret. No-one wants a big page of errata to look at on a website when they’re trying to play a paper gamebook.
My current thinking is – press ahead with the formatting of the pdf and squash as many bugs as possible; use placeholder images where necessary – although Ben has completed the illustrations, some of them need re-formatting before I can use them; get a pdf copy to any of you who would like to playtest it as soon as I can. This is different to how I’ve done things before and it would not be a real release of an e-book – but it has a couple of upsides. Firstly, anyone who wants to get started on the adventure can do so, importing a current character or continuing a current game. Secondly, that means more eyes spotting problems – whether typos, broken links or other issues. How does that sound?
I really want to do the book justice after more than 2 years of writing, so rushing it out now is not a great option. I also need more time to complete the other pieces of the project, such as the logbook and the two standalone stories I promised you! I thought I’d be able to write those while the book was in playtesting, but all my writing time has been taken up with finishing Princes of the West and tying up the many loose ends I had left.
So what’s next? I can answer that directly. In the next fortnight I mean to:
– Continue importing the draft into the publisher document and making corrections where necessary.
– Triple-check (I’ve done it twice already!) the codeword list
– Check all connections to other Steam Highwayman books – written and unwritten
– Fix the rumour engine (I’ve had to write a lot more rumours since I first did this – so some need to be unplugged and some need to be plugged in)
– Write a little roadkill passage for section 51 (which turned out to be almost duplicate 😉 )
Next update due: 30/1/26
A painful fortnight. Last Monday (8th December), I spent several hours planning the sequence that has given me the greatest amount of trouble in the whole book: Lundy. It is based around some real history and a couple of nice gameplay ideas that have been with me for over two years, yet I’d not completed them on account of the complexity of the idea, my dissatisfaction with my various attempts and something doggedly frustrating about the whole section. But I collated all my previous drafts, cut some pieces out of the main draft, replanned some flowcharts and prepared to write.
Then on Tuesday, I wrote solidly for around six hours, putting down more than three thousand words. And as I steamed into the final passage – which is actually a fortuitous reuniting with the Ferguson after a long velosteamless sequence – I felt a heaviness come upon me. It was the flu.
Rather than being able to celebrate that the final piece of a very troublesome draft had at last been completed, I rang up everyone I was committed to for the next few days, cancelled everything and battened down the hatches. It got me – it got my wife – it got three of my four small children. Think of sleepless, feverish toddlers who can’t say what they need or want – frustrated parents who can hardly keep their own tempers – a writer kept from his draft – a mother soldiering on for the sake of her loved ones.
It was tragic. And no choice was involved whatsoever.
In the last two days I’ve been recovering. Today I managed to renumber all the passages from that blitz last Tuesday and import them into the main draft – which now stands at a colossal 2271 passages. Then after doing that, I’ve begun the final item check – testing that each of the items is where it should be. This is prior to setting the shops right – more than 50 of them – where you should be able to offload your loot and buy supplies for mending your vel and keeping your fires stoked. As well as crucial stuff like cough medicine.
I’m considerably behind where I wanted to be: I hoped to be able to release a late-playtesting version to you before Christmas – there has already been some playtesting since April this year – and I had hoped to be well into the formatting of the main book, as well as further along in the production of the extras. Nonetheless, I’m happy with what I’ve managed to do – particularly considering the flu.
Will this effect my completion date? Realistically, I think that February would be miraculous – but I don’t think it will be long after. I will need to look back at my main project timeline with fresh eyes and book in the time for everything before I can be more specific. Ben is in the process of drawing the final spot illustrations – his main pages are finished – and the main map is close to completion too – it just needs a little more labelling.
I won’t be doing anything else on the project now until the New Year – I’m taking a break from the saddle – so next update is due 16.1.26. Thanks for all your support and patience – Princes of the West is going to be a gamebook for the record books.
I’ve put in several solid days and a few evenings this fortnight. What’s happened to the draft? I have…
That means I haven’t completed some of the tasks I wanted to last update. Lundy is still to complete, although several of the modules listed above relate to it directly. I haven’t corrected anyone’s inconsistent accent. That’s all to come. But I’m getting closer and closer to the moment when I can stop.
Right now there’s a crying baby on my lap, so I’m going to stop here.
Next update due: 19.12.25