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!
That’s the chain of updates, of course. But also, in a moment of genuine inspiration, I created a unique marker that unlocks several parts of the Smuggling Module (Q1h/Q165) – the chain tattoo that you gain, involuntarily, after completing your smuggling training with the Terror, Terence Kneebone, aboard his steam crester, the Swell Dolly.
Who is the Steam Highwayman? A free adventurer, bound to no-one, riding wherever you will… Until you accept something like Penrose’s ring or the chain tattoo and you become associated with a dreaming visionary revolutionary or a ruthless smuggler.
This last two weeks I’ve been working almost entirely on the smuggling module. I thought I could write a short series of passages, but to balance out the scale of the trade network I’ve already built for firkins of brandy and the like, I have needed some size, length and openness. In a way, I’ve rebuilt something like the open-sea module, but without as much freedom. Yet I’ve still needed some passage extensions to the book to fit in what’s needed.
How does it work? Well, that all depends where you are. In Devon, you’ll simply need to find some smugglers on the North or South coast, win their trust, hire them to sail with you, head out to a rendezvous on a foreign shore or at sea, buy contraband and then bring it to a depot point, put it ashore, return to your port, head to your depot, get your contraband aboard your velosteam – provided you have your barrel panniers fitted – be lucky enough to escape the attention of the Constables, bring your cargo to a buyer, like a friendly landlord, avoid narks, get a good price and repeat. Information regarding most of this – rendezvous points, willing smugglers, innkeepers happy to buy and places where you can hide your goods – is readily available as a series of rumours you’ll hear in pubs, freight yards or on the road.
And in Cornwall? It’s complicated by the Imperial Blockade, which is meant to stop small craft bringing goods into Cornwall, so you’ll need to be lucky in avoiding their ships, or have money for bribes, or a fearless crew ready to fight, or perhaps a craft that can submerge… And then, once ashore, your sale of spirits is carefully observed by the gangs answering to Bad Percy and the Terror – so you’ll need to pay a share whenever you do sell some barrels, cutting into your profits.
And of course, you’ll need to wear the chain tattoo to gain the trust of anyone in the network.
If it sounds complex, it is. There are around thirty codewords that track your access to rendezvous and depot locations, the availability of the six different vessels you can sail with and the attitudes of the gangs towards you. There are around thirty rumours that carry information about it all – and although the module is mostly standalone, it ties in, of course, with several of the key dynamics of the Rebellion. After all, liquor is not the only contraband you can smuggle into Free Cornwall.
Why bother? Wasn’t the book almost finished already? Well, Cornwall without smuggling would be like a pasty without pastry – it would always have been a massive regret. And to do it well, as I mentioned above, when there is now a network of around forty places wanting to buy your firkins of gin or lace scarves, I needed something semi-open. I’ve done my best to limit the size and repetitiveness of the strands, but I’ve also accepted that the book will be massively improved by something that is at my standard of ‘good-enough’ – I don’t need to invent new mechanics to solve this. Hence the proliferation of codewords, when instead some sort of map-based solution has occasionally suggested itself to me.
This is going to greatly alter the balance of the book. The amount of money that can be made is large – as long as you have capital. It increases the danger that Terence Kneebone poses and embroils you deeper in his nefarious network. Who is the Steam Highwayman? In Cornwall, a smuggler of unlicensed brandy, steaming along clifftops with the Constables in pursuit, just as the place demands.
So since last update I have:
Fixed a roadside encounter with poor workmanship
Written a new pub in Helston
Completed Q11 – the orchestral airship quest.  This is a fun one reminiscent of the airship quests in Highways & Holloways.
Planned more than 200 passages of the smuggling module
Whoops! I missed my schedule and didn’t post last night – funny, since I’ve had a draft of this update for almost the full fortnight…
And it’s been a good one. I’ve managed 4.5 days on the project, so progress looks like this:
I completed the Quest Survey! Â Princes of the West contains 167 quests and encounters, ranging from the mighty Quest 1 to the diminutive fleeting encounter with a Welsh Druid.
I worked for several hours on the Codeword chart, and trimmed 3 unnecessary codewords. Â Yes!
I completed the Room Survey, Â and then standardised the options you have when staying in pubs, out-of-the-way farms, country houses and caves. Â Rooms are crucial to the model of rob-flee-rest, and not every room gets the same options…
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about baths – one of the new systems I added into The Reeking Metropolis, but never really tidied up, meaning that it is quite possible that your character may still stink (GAL-2) after 5 years… There are now plenty of places to bathe in the west…
Seeing a gap in the far west, I created a new room in St Ives, which might yet get a spin-off quest (168?)… Â As I re-wrote the pub, I joined up the passages with a sequence governed by the key codeword Dictatorial – you’ll remember this one. Â It was one of the first modules I wrote for Princes of the West, almost two years ago (October 2023), and the smoothness of the narrative flow made me laugh aloud in glee. Â You probably won’t notice a seam in the story, but there is an enforcer and friends who seem to move across Cornwall even faster than you…
I worked on the Shop Survey, which showed me I need to be very careful, as this risks becoming repetitive, wasteful and even broken! Â There are more than 300 items in Steam Highwayman, and exactly where and how you can buy and sell them is crucial. Â So I am considering some new buying and selling rules, including suspicious items*, item classes and an item gazette printed in the rear of the book.
This meant I had to look at the Item Survey, so I updated my master spreadsheet to reference all the current instances of items. Â This is crucial to standardising their spellings, stats and prices… Â But it can also be a creative process, as it prompts me to consider which items are currently under-utilised… Â Perhaps that auto-rifle prototype you created for the Great Exhibition would be of interest to the Cornish rebels?
Following this, I worked on the Defeat Cycle for a few hours. Â One of the inspirations behind this is the ‘chumbawumba’ loop in Sid Meier’s Pirates! Gold, which I began playing in around 1996 and is my essential standard of sandbox/open-world/roleplaying game. Â I’m a hard enemy of permadeaths, really – I’ll cheat to avoid them and improve the story – so in Steam Highwayman when you are finally defeated in a battle, arrested or left at the roadside for dead, there are always a few routes open to you… Â Friendships are key here – I really liked the way these were written back in Smog & Ambuscade and in The Reeking Metropolis I loved the idea that the Waterside boys might repay you with a rescue. Â So there are several loops to get you back up again, both in Cornwall and Devon.
I’m closing in on completing a key quest that opens up when you are arrested by the Constables. Â It was an early sketch but I’ve never been quite happy with it, so it’s a priority.
And Ben submitted drafts of four full-page illustrations… Â A tiny part of one is below, to whet your appetite.
And what next, in the next fortnight? Or where next?
I’ll be in Devon and Cornwall for most of the next two weeks, visiting a few locations that have stubbornly resisted inspiration, gathering real ideas to turn into story content. It’ll be a family holiday-cum-business trip, and steam trains profit both.
I might manage to actually write while I’m there, but I’m not putting any pressure on myself. If it happens, it’ll happen, and if it doesn’t, I know I’ll be all the more efficient once back at home.
And what else has been taking up my time? This is less relevant to the project and more of interest if you want to know what sort of things influence me and…
Reading online:
Rand Roll – including a recent interview with Joseph Fry, whose excellent Lost in the City I read in draft last year, and which I recommend as an atmospheric and original modern gamebook.
The excellent filfre.net posted an article about… gamebooks! Â This is one of my regular fortnightly reads, as Jimmy Maher’s history of computer games is exciting, nostalgic, well-researched and fluently-written. Â His archives include a fantastic 10-part study of Civilisation.
I’m circumnavigating the works of Patrick O’Brien for the sixth or seventh time – currently in The Far Side of the World.
I’m reading Judges with my family… Â My children are just encountering the biblical, unwatered-down account of Samson.
I’m reading the Gospels – particularly to inform my Sunday preaching at church – usually twice a month.
I recently read and enjoyed Robert Macfarlane’s children’s picture book The World to Come – if you have children under ten, take a look. Â Rob went to my school and then taught me at university, so I have an interest in his writing.
I’ve been watching two fantastic youtube series, each of which have reached some recent highlights:
I’ve just posted my 38th Kickstarter update for Steam Highwayman: The Reeking Metropolis. More than half of the rewards are on their way and it’s been very exciting to see pictures of my books being unwrapped and appearing on bookshelves all over the world.
As part of the project, I promised to produce an updated Reader’s Companion to accompany the first three volumes. It’s ready for download here. Did you use the previous one for books I and II? Fancy sharing the possession you really couldn’t put down? Fancy showing how much you stashed away in Coulter’s? I haven’t seen any of these filled in, except for my own.
Over on Kickstarter you can read the most recent update for my Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis project. It’s a while since I’ve linked them up on here, but why not? You’ll find out which map took me longest to draw, and how soon I hope for the book to be on its way to backers!
Over on Kickstarter you can read my most recent progress report about the Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis project, including a little bit of background about the fine illustration you can see above these words, which is, of course, by the one and only Russ Nicholson.
I took a week (and a couple of extra days) off from working on Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis to visit the Lake District with my wife and daughter. The project hasn’t stopped, though – faithful Russ has been churning out the good old black-and-white, as you will be able to see over on the new Kickstarter update. I’m very pleased to be able to reveal the first full-page feature for The Reeking Metropolis – so take a look at Update 19!
You can also discover where I went in the Lake District to encounter some live steam…Â mmm!
I’ve just posted another update over on Kickstarter, giving a bit more info about what I’ve been up to over the last fortnight, and where I mean to be in a fortnight’s time.
Russ’s rendition of a Hampstead Hostelry
Suffice to say, the draft of the gamebook itself is close to completion, and I hope to reach the end or a point near enough for editing and revision to begin, by the end of next week.
Over on Kickstarter you can read 
