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Rand Roll Interview Illustrates Steam Highwayman’s Niche in a Giant Gaming Ecosystem

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.

August 13

Three days to go!

Three days to go on Steam Highwayman II Kickstarter! The campaign is almost complete and has been a great development from last year’s campaign. As I wrote previously, the project has now moved on to be mainly supported by readers and would-be-readers of the gamebook. I still count a few faithful friends and family members amongst the 188 backers to date, but in fact I’m now making new friends through the readers of Steam Highwayman. Gamebook collectors and enthusiasts like Ben Roberts, who seems to have developed a strange idea that the Steam Highwayman is really a gourmet in search of the perfect pork pie, and Stuart Lloyd, a critic, writer and fellow tutor who always provokes me to think about the boundaries between learning and play. Then there’s Dave Morris, who twelve months ago was a distant and admired hero, but has now become a faithful supporter of the Steam Highwayman project, and Jon Ingold, whose 80 Days did so much to inspire me to get on and produce a text adventure. At the Suffolk Steampunk Spectacular, hosted by the Long Shop Museum at Leiston, I was greeted by Dean Allen Jones, already familiar with my work and keen to buy another copy, having given his first away to a hungry nephew.

And that’s not all. Do you like an occasional graph? I like an occasional graph, but not too late in the evening as they keep me awake. This colourful little google-powered histogram shows how the backers of The Return of Steam Highwayman are distributed around the world! I’m looking forward to the completion so that, once I gather addresses, I can make myself a shaded world map (again, google-powered), but even now I am enthralled by the beauty of distribution. If you’re canny, you’ll be able to identify your place in one of these bright bars: Ben Roberts, backer #1, you’ll be at the foot of the long blue one…

I did try creating a scattergraph which correlated repeat backer’s SH2 campaign backer number with their SH1 campaign backer number, just to see what sort of result I’d get. Mark Lain managed to bag spot number 5 both times, which I know tickled us both, but otherwise there was no sort of pattern at all. But that’s why you whack data into a graph, isn’t it? To interpret bare facts into something for those visual processors we have. I’ve always been a thinking-by-drawing sort of person – making maps, plans and designs was my idea of fun from childhood and if I could get away with doing it full time, you bet I would.

Enough rambling. A big thanks to everyone who has joined the project in the last few weeks – you’re very welcome and I really look forward to getting to know you better as the books keep coming…

November 9

Buzz!

Something has changed about my Steam Highwayman project. For several years, it was an idea in my head that I occasionally mentioned to my brother or sister, or toyed with on my laptop. Then I saw other people standing up and making a success out of their writing, using their brains and passion to push something from their imagination into reality. 80 Days, by Inkle, wasn’t a commission. Nobody asked for it or told Jon Ingold, Joe Humfrey and Meg Jayanth to write it: they chose to and made it work.

So in September 2016 I changed my attitude about my writing: I was unlikely ever to meet a patron who would sponsor me in comfort and style to create something with the perfect brief, giving me creative control but enough direction to get going. I had to make it work.

I chose to work on Steam Highwayman because, unlike my efforts in writing novels, I had good example for a printed, multi-volume gamebook in Morris and Thomson’s Fabled Lands. I also believed that I could produce something with a limited, defined scale of success. I recognised that, despite my inherent need to develop and surpass any model, I needed to choose a ceiling to bump up against.

So I began writing, first using Twine to create something that could be made available to modern readers on their phones, but soon changed to focus on producing something I have a much stronger understanding of: a printed book.

And then at Christmas 2016 I had to defend my decision to my dad.

It was great: he grilled me in front of my family and my wife and I had enough answers. Not every answer, but enough. He was a self-employed multi-discipline artist/manager/technician at an architect for a quarter century and knows a thing or two about breaking ground, managing yourself and finishing projects. And about making it happen.

I think that was the beginning of the buzz. When I began to see that Steam Highwayman, if successful, would become much bigger than I could imagine – that people would discuss it without me being directly involved in the discussion – that it would be strong enough for me to not have to defend it or explain it.

So now it has all changed. This weekend I promoted the project with a live reading at a Steampunk event in Surrey. Before the end of the afternoon, there were several dozen people talking to each other about this character, the Steam Highwayman. THE Steam Highwayman – as if he or she had an independent existence. At one exciting moment, I was introduced as the Steam Highwayman, but when I demurred and asked ‘Who is the Steam Highwayman?’ I was met with the ringing reply, as my friend pointed to those around, ‘You are the Steam Highwayman!’

Last night I dreamed I was travelling along a dusty road and, stopping to refuel at a petrol station, overheard two strangers discussing what they had been reading. You guessed it: in my dreams, unconnected randomers are discussing Steam Highwayman.

Then in the last few days I’ve been privileged to have the support of several volunteer proof-readers, a few of whom are close friends or family, but more are people I would have never known before pushing this idea into reality. And then there’s Ben, who has been so inspiring to work with as an illustrator. Somewhere out there tonight, in the US, the UK and New Zealand, there are people reading extracts of the adventures of the Steam Highwayman – an invented character in an invented world that had no previous existence until I began to share it. Elsewhere there is a man who is devoting his time to visualising a story that is entirely made-up – but he wants to get it right and do it justice.

I’m a little bit mind-blown.