Late on Tuesday night I completed the final corrections and edits to Steam Highwayman IV: Princes of the West. Final tweaks included standardising a key character’s accent, which was amusing. She started off a bit too proper and by the end of the book I was writing her in proper Wes’ cunn’ry aaczent so I had to find all the instances of her speech and westify them. I also wrote a couple of last-minute additions – a sequence that allows you to close up one of the major quests in a more on-stage manner and an encounter with a strange man in a new location, high on Dartmoor. That was an interesting one – but I’ll write about it another time. Today you get more news.
That was the key target for the fortnight so reaching it is a big success. I also completed the Touring Guide and the large maps, so these were sent to the printers… As were the files for the previous maps and Touring Guide. These all arrived over the last few days – 28 boxes of printing.
Some of your rewards arrived at my flat on Monday. The A2 flatpacks each contain 250 maps.And here is the other half of the shipment, arrived on Tuesday. 19 boxes of booklets and folders for the Touring Guides.
I already had the Adventurer’s Logbook printed (three more boxes by my bedside. The only outstanding rewards are now the smaller A4 maps for the new Touring Guide: I have to complete the titling and superimposition of troop movements on the map of the Siege of Tintagel, and then I’ll order the A4 maps too.
The Adventurer’s logbook looks nice in the sunshine too.Some of the many, many quests to undertake, all graded by difficulty.
The living room is now piled with boxes. Over the next few weeks, my wife and I will be folding maps and assembling the Touring Guides. With a nice show on (Ludwig returns in August…) and the children asleep, it’s actually a very pleasant job.
So where does that put the project? I haven’t had the time to finalise shipping costs to Europe, so that is the next priority. Once that is done (perhaps before the next fortnightly update), I’ll be sending out postage costs collecting postage payments. I may delay this for the very beginning of August or may get to it before then.
I also have to complete the Acknowledgements section at the rear of the book – your featured spot, dear backers! This can take a little while (it isn’t simply a list of names), but once that and a fresh blurb are done for the cover, the book will be complete. I will certainly be ordering another print proof and then I will get moving with shipments.
Thanks for staying with me all this way. The book is a great adventure – as are the previous ones – and seeing it and the accompanying paratexts in solid form is deeply exciting.
PS – I suspect there are more of you attending Fighting Fantasy Fest 6 on 5 September than have yet said so. If you are, you will be able to collect your pledge with no postage to pay – but only if you tell me! If you’d like to collect at FFF6 and you haven’t yet let me know, please use this form. So far I’ve only got 8 out of 330 backers collecting. And let me tell you, collection is also a lot simpler for me!
Next fortnight’s jobs:
Complete final postage costs
Create postage payment links for each region/country
Well, the first-ever print copy of Princes of the West arrived on Saturday and I still can’t quite believe it. The colour is bright, bold and… physical! In fact, the size and weight of the entire book is one of the things that is impressing me the most. After more than two years of existing in some digital form or other and after almost ten years as a title, the book now has a physical form.
I’ve begun a playthrough of Princes and I’ve been having a great time. Fine-tuning mechanics like damage, repair, fleeing from the Constables and selling loot have all really added to the core gameplay loop and it now feels like the reader is more a dark, mysterious figure of ambush than ever. But there are also the classic Highwayman challenges: I’ve succesfully located victims, impersonated a Constable to get them to stop, beaten them in a duel, robbed them and then set off back to my hideout… But with a couple of unlucky rolls, I’ve then had Constables on my tail – in an airship, no less – and then crashed my velosteam and been taken up.
But your adventure doesn’t end there. There is a long quest sequence to occupy you the first time you are arrested and subsequent shorter ones and so far I haven’t been notorious enough to merit hanging… So I escaped from gaol once, served one term and, in my playthrough, am currently back on the road with a couple of debuffs and a steep hill to climb to get back up to where I want to be. But my hideout is still stuffed with items and I have reliable friends and good revenue avenues to explore among the smugglers. And a nice cheese-trading route I found.
The cheese-trading route is something I want to tell you about. Steam Highwayman is carefully plotted, but as an entire book it is more of an environment containing stories rather than a single narrative. That means that although there are characters and quests that you can enjoy, much of your tale is really an emergent narrative that proceeds from ingredients in the game system. So, for example, I have a strong trading system across the book with around 100 items traded in 50 locations at variable prices. Local supply and narrative causality demand that the prices are lower in places and that means that occasionally, just occasionally, it is possible to make a profit with entirely honest trading.
In previous books this has occurred – sometimes less-carefully – and it has sometimes been criticised as a bug or at the very least as an exploit – but because of the travel mechanics I use, it is very rare that these sales are totally risk-free. So, in my wheel of cheese example – I noticed, while visiting an industrial area in the south of the map, that the sale price of a wheel of cheese was pretty high – presumably because of all the workers demanding good, nourishing home food and the fact that no-one there has the time to make their own cheese. In fact, that rang a faint bell and I think I probably chose that price with exactly that justification.
In the next few places I visited, I kept my eyes open in the markets but didn’t find cheese available at a price lower than that sale price in the industrial location. But when I ventured to North Devon, I found a place that sold wheels of cheese at a great price – I could make a healthy profit on each one I carried. So I did what any self-respecting road pirate would do – jettisoned cheap and unnecessary equipment, hid the good stuff and bought as many cheeses as I could strap aboard my vel.
All was going well as I rode south in the Devon sunshine. Birds singing, cows mooing, Constables tipping their hats to honest cheese salesmen – when I encountered a weird, folkloric event that tossed a spanner into the works. I ended up crashing my velosteam badly and while the cheese was okay, my Ferguson was leaking steam and barely running. I made it to my destination, limping along on partial pressure, and sold the cheese, but then had to find somewhere to mend the machine. I didn’t want to risk going far, so I found a nearby repairman… whose high prices swallowed nearly all my cheese profit. I had made a few shillings and left all my good stuff at the other side of the county.
And I laughed. Because, frustrating though it was, this was exactly the kind of ‘partial success’ that makes a good story. Duncan Thomson has a gamebook underway in which dicerolls explicitly lead to success, failure and partial or flawed success, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. There have been other big wins in the playthrough – a visit to the roadside fair with some lovely prose, a pretty girl and a stat buff – a big sale of my first smuggled firkin of liquor allowing me to buy much-needed customisations for the vel – the escape, by the skin of my teeth, from an island prison – but it is the partial successes that really make me feel like I’m inhabiting something. Another velosteam crash left me with two wasted firkins of whisky and a spoiled quest. An accident while labouring with a steam-chisel in a prison quarry left me with a wound and a heavy Ability debuff, meaning my character is going to become dependent on those powerful pink pills if I want to regain my prowess. I snuck into the Constable’s store to regain my confiscated equipment, but when I got there… ah, I won’t spoil that one for you!
Steam Highwayman isn’t just about the stories I have written in it – it creates stories as you choose within this explorable environment. That’s why I love an open-world gamebook – or an open-world game. From Pirates! Gold to Fable Lands, Skyrim to GTA, I love how our experience turns events – even randomly generated ones – into coherent stories – so long as the world is well-crafted.
And speaking of craft, I’ve put a lot of time into smoothing out the first few hours of gameplay in Princes. I have another set of edits to put into the files and mean to continue with the playthrough and other checks for at least another fortnight. I’ve also had some more feedback on the introduction to the book, spent a lot of time working on shipping costs and been drawing some illustrations for the Guide.
Here’s the Old Devon Inn – the Princes analogue of the Old Exeter Inn in Ashburton. I haven’t actually been there – I couldn’t fit it in on our tour of the west last September – but it is still a bucket list. I mean, they have a painting of one of my great heros on the wall outside!
And on Sunday I won’t be serving at my church but attending the League of Essextraordinary Gentlemen’s Steampunk Shenanigans at the East Anglian Railway Museum at Earl’s Colne, near Colchester. It’ll be my first steampunk event for a year, but a group that I know and like and a location I really enjoy. I’ll be reading – it’ll be the very first reading from Princes – and selling books to the unsuspecting steampunk and non-steampunk public. See you there?
I’ve made progress on the map of Tintagel; scrubbed the map of Plymouth (I didn’t like drawing it) and re-organised the passages for Plymouth in the book so you won’t need a map; sketched out another map to replace it; drawn two guide illustrations (at least 1 more needed); continued the codeword check; priced about half of the shipping.
In the next fortnight I will:
complete proofing the print and create a final edit of Princes of the West!
Now we’re really steaming. I completed all the corrections earlier this week and I’ve uploaded the first digital files to Ingram so that I could order a print proof. It should arrive in the next couple of weeks and you’ll be treated to a photo of me holding it in the next update, if all goes well.
Here’s a screenshot of the print order. You can see that the print cost of the book implies a large volume… We’re looking at 438 pages and 2250ish passages.
The book isn’t quite finalised – there are a few gameplay edits still pending, but I want to have a think about these while turning the real pages, and I’ll take the time to have a playthrough as well. You can always catch a few more errors in print too.
However, having digital files ready is a crucial catalyst for the project: it allows me to get a final print cost and book size and weight, which I need to proceed with the shipping preparations. I’ll explain more soon, but rather than use the Kickstarter pledge manager, I’m going to be collecting shipping costs directly through Stripe. It means I can tailor the costs a lot more finely, hopefully keeping shipping to a minimum for all of us! I’ve begun looking at the costs and overall it seems my estimates were fairly good, despite the time that has passed.
But there is one particular shipping option I want to draw your attention to: collection. The final costing of the book and extras has shown that the project is within budget and therefore then there is nothing more to pay if you collect your rewards. When and where? Howabout at Fighting Fantasy Fest 6, on Saturday 5th September, in London, UK?
If you haven’t been, the Fest is the premier convention devoted exclusively to gamebooks – including, of course, the Fighting Fantasy series. However, it has also become a haven for the independent authors of the gamebook renaissance and a great place to meet heros of the medium both past and present. It’s organised by the stalwart Jon Green whose work bridges both the original Fighting Fantasy books and modern independent gamebooks. What a legend.
If you mean to be there, then use this form to register to collect your rewards in person. Please try and use the same email that you used for your pledge so that I don’t lose your response!
If you can’t make it to the convention but would like to arrange collection in London, UK on a date following 5th September, just put a note in the form.
Otherwise, I’ll be sending out links to collect shipping payments and arrange final addresses in about a month for everyone who wants their rewards delivered to their door. I’ve put a lot of work into shipping costs but they aren’t quite finalised yet.
It was late last year when I first wondered if this was all going to come together in time for FFF6 and I’m pleased to say that I’m on schedule for a complete set of physical rewards by then. The extra adventures may take a little longer or may also be ready in time – I’m not sure.
So what else needs doing? Here’s a longer list of the remaining jobs of the project.
– Acknowledgements
– Complete 2 maps (Plymouth and the siege of Tintagel)
– Write short adventures (Dark, Satanic Mills and Harvest of Death)
– Complete shipping estimates and plan
– Digital decorations for boxes, frames etc
– Look over / improve character sheets
– Codeword check (partly done!)
– Create companion (partly done)
– Order maps
– Complete Touring Guide 2 (about 20 pages to do)
– Draw pubs (at least 3 to draw)
– Order guide folders
– Order guidebooks
– Assemble folders
– Order packaging
– Assemble TG2s
– Order TG1s
– Assemble TG1s
– Chase Wanted Posters
– Create remaining wanted posters
– Set up stripe links for shipping payments
– Update SH1-3 companion
– Update SH1
– Update SH2
– Update SH3
– Update errata
In the next fortnight I’ll be keenly awaiting that print proof, doing the taxes for my wife’s small company (an home education hub) and trying to survive in the heat. I may get to the drawing of the maps or work on the guide – pretty much all of the remaining jobs are pleasant ones and I’m not pressurising myself now.
What’s in the Steam Highwayman’s tankard? A pint of Marston’s Pedigree.
The big map is complete and print-ready! I had to stop myself from ordering it immediately – it’ll be better value to order in a complete set along with all the parts for the old and new guidebooks from my printer – but I’m excited, clearly.
I haven’t sat down and begun the corrections yet: on the one hand, there’s been an awful lot of other work to do, and on the other, I must admit I’m a little daunted. But once I’m working through them, I won’t easily be able to stop. The allure of a fourth printed volume is strong… And I might have that precious printed proof in my hands in a matter of weeks now.
I’ve done a little more work on the guidebook, including rearranging maps for the scenic routes and some work on the pub list. This isn’t yet finished, however.
The 100 Endings Playthrough month is going well: there are more than a dozen contributors on Reddit and Discord sharing their ideas about the books, with fresh posts most days. A couple of potential readers have become late-stage backers as a result and there have also been a flurry of map and book orders to dispatch.
I’ll be away at a church conference for part of next week, so there won’t be a large amount of time for more work, but the week following should be a good chance to get down to some of these: I’ve been instructed to turn up for Jury duty at the start of July, so ideally I’ll have the corrections and internals completed by then. It makes a good deadline, eh?
Not much other news: a few bits of family business have needed my attention this week, but I won’t detail them here. I also addressed an online entrepreneurs group last weekend about the lessons drawn from crowdfunding – and noted the importance of creator credibility and communication! And then there’s a friend’s book of poems I’m publishing, with a book launch in London on 23rd of this month.
Thanks for your patience over all this time. Next update due: 22.5.26
May is here and it is Steam Highwayman‘s turn to be featured on the 100 Endings Book Club, hosted by Duncan Thomson of Rand Roll.
For the duration of the month, I’m offering a special bundle of the first three books with maps for £45 + shipping and there’s already been a new crop of adventurers ordering their copies so that they can explore the woods and lanes of the midnight road…
As the month progresses, I’ll be lurking on forums, answering questions, offering hints, behind-the-scenes explanations and maybe some pictures of planning maps and things – if you like to know how these gamebooks get created. I plan to be running at least two AMA (ask-me-anything) sessions too – I’ll signpost these.
The main discussion will take place on Discord, with some more on Reddit, and you’re very welcome to see what new explorers make of your old favourites. Mayhaps this’ll prompt some of you faithful backers to pick the books up once more and explore corners never previously reached!
Hello everyone. It’s been a good fortnight for Princes of the West. What have I been up to?
Checking in on proofreaders and playtesters ahead of their May deadline.
Working on the maps and guidebook
Unpacking the first printed rewards!
The proofreading and playtesting team have been wrapping up their work and I’m incredibly grateful. I’ve ended up with … around 700 issues to respond to! These aren’t all errors or mistakes and very few of them were gameplay problems, but I’m grateful for all the time that has been spent by keen supporters checking my work, both minimising the mistakes that could cause problems for you when you play the books and getting the pages looking their best.
My plan is to begin the editing in corrections and changes in May – so I should have begun by next update.
The original A2 map design I made was just a bit too short for the map design, so I spent a bit of time on a large ipad doing a digital tracing and drawing to extend the map eastwards. I was pretty happy with that, so I pushed on with the design and ended up with a great-looking design that is nearly finished. Rather like the map for The Reeking Metropolis, I’m including a gazette of locations on the map itself, with grid references for some of the important ones. There’s also going to be at least one in-world advertisement filling in gaps and adding to the lore. Perhaps I can bury a clue in there too?
I also drew up a map for Dartmoor, which is going to be one of the smaller maps in the pack. Whereas in the first one I had three gamebooks to map and offered three A2 maps, this time I have a single – massive – volume, so there’ll be one A2 map and three smaller ones covering different regions or sections of gameplay – I won’t say more right now.
I’ve also been writing the booklet that will accompany the maps and that has given me the giggles, I can tell you. The in-world creator of these guides seems to be a bit clueless about the political situation, though reliable on where to find cheap coalgas for the velosteam.
In my previous update I mentioned the arrival of the first printed rewards – the Adventurer’s Log. The delivery of these was far from simple but I got my hands on 300 copies after ten days or so. They look great and the responses I’ve had really vindicate my decision to put time into producing them. In a way, they act as a little ambassador for the whole project, giving an idea of the sort of quest content in the four books so far.
What’s next?
Throughout May, the 100 Endings Book Club, hosted by Duncan Thomson on Discord and Reddit, are holding a playthrough of Steam Highwayman. I mean to be participating in a couple of AMA (ask-me-anything) sessions as well as hanging out on both forums to advise, hint, tease and generally enjoy my books through other players’ eyes. You’re all welcome to join in – and if any of you are desperately keen to join in but haven’t actually got copies yet, let me know and I’d be willing to split your bundle.
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.
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.
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.
