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!
- complete the Touring Guide and order the prints!
- complete the maps and order them too!
- finalise shipping costs!
Next update due: 16.7.26