Tag: sh3

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Chasing my lost ruthlessness (and nimbleness, gallantry and engineering): Steam Highwayman playthrough

In October I began a new playthrough across the three completed Steam Highwayman volumes, but got caught by my old enemy, the Coal Board before really getting very far, and was forced into a year of servitude with serious attribute penalties.

Well, to keep myself in the mode, I’ve been continuing to dip into that playthrough in the last few days while feeling a bit under the weather. Steam HIghwayman was always meant to be as fun to fail as to win, so I picked myself up, shook off the coal dust and made a plan: I would find the in-game ways to regain my attributes and boost them even further!

Freed onto the dirty streets of Camden, I rode down to the Pineapple at Lambeth, where I remember explosives fetch a good price. The Coal Board were more interested in punishing me than confiscating my stuff, you see, and after a year in storage my explosives were still valuable goods in someone’s eyes. They might end up reaching Flat Billy, the crimelord, but I shan’t worry about that for now. Someone told me about the street gang who mudlark on the north bank, so I rode through Southwark, grabbing a cold pork pie on the way, popping over to Spitalfields to buy a new pistol and sabre, and then dropping in on the boys corner of the muddy foreshore. After a little repetitive mudlarking (amazing how many Constables’ whistles the silt can cover) I met the Waterside Boys themselves and, with my abysmally low GALLANTRY, mud-smeared clothes and, crucially, fresh Southwark pork pie, I won their hearts and their allegiance.

Another trip to the outskirts saw me stop the Coal Board once more, grab some loot and a handy codeword, report to the Telegraph Guild at Bloomsbury and claim a fairly paltry reward, considering their hatred for the other faction. I was bleeding in a couple of places after fighting off some stokers in the ambush, so I headed to Hampstead and took at room at the Holly Bush – very much out of the way.

While trying to heal my wounds there, my low INGENUITY really became a problem, so I gave thought to my long-term prospects. If I am to succeed as a highwayman, I will be getting wounded, and if wounded, I will need a reliable way to heal myself. There are a very few ways to heal wounds without resulting in scars, which inevitably lead to retirement and the dreaded epilogue, but self-help is more effective with training… So I set off on a new mission. First, I would buy medical supplies in the reeking metropolis, before heading west into the first two books… I got a cheap bottle of whisky down in the docklands too.

So once on the road to Smog and Ambuscade, I resolutely ignored any temptation to ambush anyone else and rode straight to the Red Lantern in Maidenhead, where I stocked up on one of the rarest, and most game-changing, of medical items. Pink pills (NIM + 2) [_] [_] [_] A boost to your NIMBLENESS just as you are drawing your sword can be very, very helpful in surviving a duel – particularly when you are still carrying the scars of a year’s servitude.

Then it was up to Lane End, where the good Dr Smollett can be found. He was one of the earliest characters I wrote, one I really enjoy re-reading, and one I would love to explore a bit more. I met him, let him rant at me (I really haven’t hurt or robbed anyone he would have patched up… I think!) and then returned to Marlow where, surprise surprise, he turned up in the parlour of the Ship on a dirty night wanting a ride…

So off we went to Bullocks Farm, where I assisted in the delivery of a fine baby boy. Which, incidentally and not at all the entire reason for the escapade, gained me a level of Medical Training (greatly increasing the efficacy of self-treatment – at least in SH3 onwards…).

I returned to Lane End with that bottle of whisky and we sealed our friendship over a drink, the good Doctor and I. Now on to book 2 to gain that other boost…

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The Gormley-Watt Velosteamer’s Touring Guide

I loved making the maps for my recent Kickstarter. They took a lot of time, but they were worth it. Now all fans of the series can get their hands on them!

The idea of the maps began as enlargened versions of the maps found at the front of Smog and Ambuscade and Highways and Holloways. These were originally based on Ordnance Survey maps of the area I used to live in – bought from the WHSmith on Marlow High Street – but had been drawn with the interests of my gamebooks in mind and were, to massively understate it, simplified. If I had merely scaled these up, they would have looked clumsy and dull, and some readers had already suggested improvements to the maps.

On top of this, I needed to make a fresh map for The Reeking Metropolis. The process for that was to use a digital copy of a 1:1056 Ordnance Survey map series of London published in the 1890s and to digitally trace it on an ipad Pro. I learned a fair amount in the process and so I decided to do a similar thing with the historic maps of the regions in which my first two books were set.

Tracing can be a very meditative job, and between January and March I spent many an evening drawing away. I had actually begun the job long before, but had restarted a number of times and the maps begun in January became my final ones. Colouring could be done in the ipad, but lettering was added in Microsoft Publisher (2007 edition!)

I promised a Guide Booklet as a stretch goal for my project. This was really fun to do: the cover image is a development of the Ferguson schematic I made back in 2017 for Smog and Ambuscade, together with some styling mimicked from early 20th-century bike and motoring maps. The contents took a little while to get right: I had to check through the three books fairly carefully and make sure the beer tally was correct, as well as referencing plot points for many of the pubs.

My plan of assembling and printing the guides was set long before I had final versions. Essentially, this was an exercise in mimicry once again: I set out to make something resembling The Streets of Ankh-Morpork and the Discworld Mapp. So the final order for my printer in Southend was 250 A5 booklet folders with pockets, 250 stapled guidebooks and 250 of three A2 colour posters (the three maps).

The guidebooks came in two boxes; the folders in seven and the three posters each came in a whopping A2 flatpack. They took up a corner in our living room for several months (I still have three boxes now as I write this) as Cheryl and I folded and folded and folded. Then we had to stick the guidebooks into the folders with double-sided sticky tape and tuck a set of maps into the pocket. It turned out that the printers had sent us far more than 250 of each of the maps, but exactly 250 of the guidebooks and folders, so there were going to be enough for the backers who had pledged for them, about 70 full sets left over and then around 120 sets of just the three maps.

The final product is really neat. I’m not a graphic designer by any means, but I have spent my entire life in books and printed materials, so I’m fairly savvy at putting something like this together. In some ways, it reminds me of the nonsense post my brothers and sisters and I used to send each other during long summer holidays in a family postbox, demanding prompt payment of invoices or offering spurious and over-priced correspondence courses, such as the Sternly-Blythe School of Pachydermalinguistics. Double-barrelled names do possess such a weight of Englishness, don’t they?

You can order the guidebook and maps, should they still be in stock (or possibly reprinted) here.

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Reader’s Companion for I-III Ready

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.

 

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Steam Highwayman III Kickstarter Update 36: The Book is Ready

You can read the update here.  But the update doesn’t tell you what it feels like to see a little green tick next to the mini image of the book that has been waiting for release on my IngramSpark account for over a year…  It feels great.

I’m also excited and emotional because of another little Steam Highwayman treat that was sent my way today.  Not the two backers who already let me know that they received their maps and that they loved them – that was nice.  Something even better…

Something I’m going to post about on Saturday.

In the next few weeks I’m looking forward to re-jigging this website so that Steam Highwayman is front and centre, uploading some new images and generally having a spruce-up, and also to writing about the process of making SH3.  I guess this is a spring in my step.

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Steam Highwayman III: Update 32 live

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!

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Codewords

draft sh3 codeword list (part blurred)

When Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson invented the Fabled Lands codeword system, they created something that massively increased the interactivity of gamebook adventures.  Until then, gamebooks tracked a player’s activity through a combination of several techniques: simple branching, unique possessions and player memory.  Simple branching is straightforward: if the player was reading a passage that was only reachable after a choice, then the text could ‘know’ that this choice had been taken and could describe what had happened as a result.  However, this is a one-time and one-directional choice: no reader can go back and ‘undo’ their choice in the same read-through, and other branches of the narrative are closed to them until they die and restart.

Unique possessions, usually noted in an adventure sheet, can also identify whether a player has made certain previous choices.  If a particular horned helmet is only available within the loot of a dragon, then by asking the reader whether they possess it, the book is also practically tracking whether the reader defeated or avoided the dragon earlier in the story.  However, this can be complicated if a reader has to manage a limited inventory and decides to jettison an item that seems, at the time, unimportant.

Player memory was the least sophisticated and least reliable of these methods.  It was used when a passage simply asked the reader something like ‘Have you visited this place before?’  Problems here are the ease of cheating and the need to ask this question quite soon after the original event, meaning a short consequence delay, because readers can genuinely be quite forgetful.

Whereas codewords are something else.  An alphabetical list of neutral, arbitrary(ish) words that can be ticked – and unticked – are unlose-able, repeatable and undoable trackers that can be used by the writer of a gamebook to note any variable they choose.  Your reader defeats the dragon?  Get them to tick the codeword Basket.  Your reader returns to the dragon’s cave.  If they possess Basket, all they will find is an empty cave and a faint smell of sulphur… but if they don’t possess it, turn to passage 701 where the dragon is alive and well.  Until the reader visits these passages, the appearance of the word Basket in a list in the back of the book doesn’t even hint at the mortality of a dragon.  What do these all do, we wonder.  If Basket tags a dead dragon, could Burnish imply that the protagonist is pursued by a vengeful ghost?  (That one is very Dave Morris).

In short, codewords allowed Morris and Thomson to invent the open-world, responsive gamebook.  It’s an elegant and a powerful system, and one which Fabled Lands doesn’t abuse by leaning on too heavily.  Unlike what I think I’ve done in Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis.

In the current draft, SH3 has 98 codewords…  Some of those track choices in other books and offer you the consequences of actions you took in other books – or that you will only be able to take when I write future books.  Some track non-player-character’s attitudes or destinies, locations, others track quest solutions, faction loyalties, the profitability of certain businesses and a whole lot of other stuff.  In fact, one of the powerful results of this system is the ability to cause side-effects: the reader kills a soldier and gains a certain codeword, meaning that when they return to that location, the soldier will be dead.  But what about when the player visits a nearby terrace and, possessing the same codeword, is directed to a cottage where a wife weeps over her lost husband and cries, knowing that she and her hungry children will soon be evicted for unpaid rent?  Now that’s interactivity.

But 98 is a few too many, so I’ll be trimming the fat in the next few weeks.  But until then, peer at a blurry section of the entire list and enjoy your own puzzle: what do these arbitrary words actually track?  What is possible in The Reeking Metropolis?

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Kickstarter Update: Draft Complete

Over on Kickstarter I’ve just posted an update about the current project progress. It’s a full one, including some details about plans up until November as well as lots of remarks about work complete. Head over there and enjoy the details!

Over here is a fresh image from Russ, full of action and violence – great! You might spot the eponymous hero himself somewhere in the background (sensibly masked against infectious diseases) as well as a backer in the brawl…

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Refuelling and getting back to work.

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…  mmm!

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Steam Highwayman III Update: Plenty of Progress

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.

Black and white line drawing of the Holly Bush Inn, Hampstead
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.