Roleplaying as the Steam Highwayman is all about being on the road, exploring and encountering, and happening upon opportunities. One way I’ve achieved this in the first three books is by placing uni-directional journey passages between locations – they show up orange on the map above. I stole this technique from Fabled Lands, of course, where they are particularly used in Cities of Gold and Glory and Over the Blood-Dark Sea. These journeys achieve a couple of things: they can slow your passage through the world, for good or bad, and they can be an opportunity for unplanned roadside encounters. They typically look like this:
Up until now, I’ve relied upon a mechanic I inherited from Fabled Lands – the random encounter table, which usually looks a bit like type A. If each encounter is unique to the location, then after experiencing it, a fixed link can redirect the reader to the eventual destination (which in this case would be passage 233), but since Highways & Holloways I’ve used generic, repeatable encounters, such as bad weather, which can be met in different locations. These need the reader to note which passage they will eventually be spat out at when they follow the instruction ‘turn to your noted passage’.
The main benefit of the random table is that you can’t really know what is going to happen on any given journey. But I’ve come to wonder if this unpredictability is less of a benefit than I originally thought. So type B shows an alternative.
Downsides to this style include the duplication of links – 233 gets mentioned four times here, which isn’t elegant. I could replace each mention after the first with ‘noted passage’, but that’s also rather clunky and a bit of a typographic challenge. See type C below.
The mechanic used in B and C is a tick-box list. For better or worse, the reader must pass through the events on this journey in sequence: the first time they steam this way, they will meet the seven sisters. On their second journey, they will proceed directly to 233. On the third, they will encounter rain (a generic passage that has minor consequences). Only on their fifth travel along this road will they talk to the boy with the broken basket.
Upsides: no annoying dice that stubbornly refuse you to access an event you haven’t been to. Also, there is no need to use a tickbox within an encounter to make it a one-time event, which always feels like a cheat to me.
Downsides: duplication, predictability and writing in the book. A player who knows that travelling down a certain road might trigger a rainstorm might avoid it – and then again, they might forget exactly when. Also, for the sizeable minority who dislike writing in their book, this list has to be exported elsewhere, eg into a new companion. And if you re-play the entire game, it’s another set of tickboxes to erase…
After five journeys down this road, the passage becomes effectively useless – but perhaps that was the case with the random table anyway? Are my readers that keen to re-play minor encounters without a differing outcome? In a book as large as a volume of Steam Highwayman, how long is it before someone re-rides or exhausts one of these journeys anyway?
I’m really interested to see what you all think about these two (relatively minor) mechanics, and whether there are strong preferences. Perhaps you have another system entirely to suggest? I’m unlikely to entirely switch over from type A to type B, but with almost 50 unidirectional journey passages in Steam Highwayman: The Princes of the West, I want to eliminate anything that really annoys a majority of readers. I’m actually thinking increasingly hard about my gameplay design, which I know isn’t perfect, and I’ll be posting some more issues like this in the future.
And if you’re really interested in thinking about random event tables and their use in tabletop rpgs, do take a look at Duncan Thomson’s https://www.randroll.com/. They get a lot more complicated than my simple ones here, and he has a huge wealth of content. Need a table to generate a fantasy encounter for sailing the open sea? Or a list of 100 winter-themed trinkets? Off you go.