Tag: Steam Highwayman

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The Princes of the West draft finished… for now.

Yesterday I reached a milestone of Steam Highwayman IV: Princes of the West: I told myself that I had ‘completed’ my draft.

What does that mean?  First question from interested parties (eg my wife).  “Is the book finished?”

No, it isn’t finished.  It won’t be finished until it has been edited, improved, illustrated and printed.  We’re a little way off all that.  But I would say that I am not at the beginning of the end.

Why did I call a stop to drafting?  I actually have around 100 passages still reserved to write, but I recognise that at the current rate, I would keep expanding the book.  That’s a problem for a few reasons – one being, that eventually this volume will need to be printed, and I think we could be looking at a whopping 1800 passages, or around 300 pages, already.  I also could tell that at my current rate of writing, I would exhaust myself badly.  And the next stage of the writing process is a one I badly need to get some perspective: sharing the draft with early readers for their opinions and ideas. After that, there’ll be a good deal of corrections and edits to write, and when I do those I’ll also finish and finalise the last loose ends.

So I’ve begun to reach out to people who have been committed readers of Steam Highwayman and stepping back from the coal face.  I need to do some other work to get the project to succeed, so it’s time for a change of mode.  I think that there’ll be a few months of long conversations, tweaking around the edges, and then a big editing sometime in the late summer or autumn – maybe at the same time as a trip down to Cornwall myself.

Ben has been working on the cover and I hope to have some things to share very soon.  The big thing I’m waiting on is a colour draft of the front cover – with that, you’ll start to see a regular posting that points towards my next Kickstarter campaign.  I have a plan something like this:

April-June – Preparation for Kickstarter, production of marketing materials, drawing of the map.

[April/May – birth of fourth child…]

July – Kickstarter campaign to publish Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West.  It’s going to be great.

Presuming the Kickstarter succeeds in raising enough funds…

August – January – Ben creates the illustrations, I edit the book, proofreading and further playtesting, layout and preparation for printing, creation of extra reward materials…

February 2026 –  Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West sent to backers and available online.

How does that sound?

So what is Princes of the West like?  Well, early readers are already favourable about improved, modern mechanics, atmospheric adventures in the West Country, and a continuation to the epic tale of the Steam Highwayman (that’s you, then…).  It covers a large area – probably about as large as the first two books together – but uses efficient networking to save on repeated passages and cram in as much content as you can.  You’ll be able to go mining, tame Dartmoor ponies, find hidden gold, assist wreckers, join smugglers, blow things up (a lot of that), take a musical tour of the pubs of Devon, use all your velosteam customisations, negotiate with multiple factions and leaders, help lonely people fall in love, rescue cows from the mud, eat Cornish pasties, smuggle clotted cream, drink a lot of beer in many pubs and lonely inns, find places to stay, get a black eye, sleep under hedges, bribe guards, take airship rides, impersonate an orchestral conductor, defend the poor and marginalised, ally with a visionary (mad?) King, join a fishing crew, play croquet (again), meet old friends, play cards, fix the stock market, use steam computational engines to decode messages and secretive notebooks, use your special skill of haute cuisine (you know, the one you gained in Highways and Holloways when you had to distinguish between different heritage vegetables while in an airborne kitchen) and rob the rich, give to the poor and steam off into the night.  It is great.

Current draft is about 1630 passages long.  I think I’ll probably cut around 100 and I might add in another 200 or so – I expect it’ll round out around 1800 passages.  I’m toying with the idea of producing a lengthier book with more quests as stretch goals…  Four extensions, say, of 50 passages each?  It’s an idea.

And the break from working on the draft is good for me.  I’ve already experienced a massive difference in my focus and no longer have an over-full head.  There are several things I’ve been putting off reading – and writing – over the last months that I can now get back to.

So watch this space!  I’ll be on here pretty frequently until July, I think, although there may be a hiatus while child #4 appears.  And then we should all get to enjoy the pleasure of a lively crowdfunding campaign together.  I know I can count on you all to join in.

Until then, may your boilers stay ever at pressure!  YOU are the Steam Highwayman!

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Ambush Sequences and the Noted Passage Mechanic

Adopting the noted passage mechanic allows me to weave sequences of story together independent of their location.  I first invented this method while writing the ambush sequences of Highways & Holloways and my recent work writing the ambushes in Princes of the West illustrates how they work.

First, there are eight major locations where you can ambush passing steamers: five in Devon and three in Cornwall.  These are not the only places where you can stop a carriage and rob the occupants, but they are the major, repeatable locations that generate large numbers of victims, which makes sense thematically, since they are all somewhere on the Haulage Guild highways – the major road network connecting the larger towns of the region.

Once committed to making an ambush in one of these eight ambush locations, the player records a noted passage specific to that ambush location – one of eight passages that function as the end of the ambush sequence.  With this information reserved at the side, the ambush sequence can then continue independent of the location, meaning that generic passages can be used to tell a story that can take place multiple times or in different places.  

It works like this.  After noting that passage, the player rolls to see what sort of vehicle is encountered – or, with the right equipment, the player lies in wait and chooses what type of vehicle to ambush.  The distribution of various Guild road trains and private carriages varies across the eight major locations, partly dependent on the location of the several Guild bases.  The Haulage Guild are universally common, but the Telegraph Guild use the highways closest to their towers, while the Coal Board are more common closer to the large mines and the Atmospheric union are only really encountered near their airfield at Harrowbeer, north of Plymouth (in our timeline, the location of a RAF base during the second World War).

Say that a player encounters a private steam carriage – the highwayman’s preference, surely.  Rich passengers travelling for pleasure are certain to have good loot aboard, and rarely fancy a fight.  The player is then sent to one of four passages (two for Devon, two for Cornwall) that each offer subtly different methods for an ambush, depending somewhat on the actual landscape surrounding that part of the highway.  Within these passages, there is also a condition checker that can take the player off on a specific ambush sequence should they be attempting to rob someone in a rainstorm.

There are more common methods (usually relying on RUTHLESSNESS or MOTORING) and unique ones (typically depending on the possessions a player has), which should mean that a player who returns to a spot could specialise in a particular type method, if their skillset supported it.  Each of these methods typically includes a skillcheck and modifies the diceroll if useful equipment is possessed or relevant conditions are met.

If you fail one of these skillchecks, you might be spat out in a generic failure passage – for example, a passage that tells you about your failure to terrify the driver of the carriage, which can include a random roll chart with slightly-annoying or much-worse outcomes.  A passage like this, which might be met many times in a playthrough, needs to be both simple (not strongly-flavoured) and variable (hence the chart).  It then sends the player into their noted passage – more on this momentarily – or might even give them the opportunity to prepare another ambush.  This might be riskier a second time if the player has suffered damage or a wound as a result of their choices.

But say that a player succeeds in their chosen method and terrifies, or rides alongside, or impersonates a Constable and waves the carriage to a halt.  Then the sequence will send the player to a passage dependent on their broad location, in Cornwall or Devon, as the travellers on either side are slightly different.  Cornwall is known to be a wilder place and more of the travellers there will defend themselves.  The rewards, however, are higher.  This passage selects a passenger for the player to encounter, and in their passage they might immediately surrender their goods or put up a fight.

Once a robbery has taken place, the player can be sent to their noted passage, just as if they had failed their skillcheck and decided not to attempt another ambush.  This passage (dependent on the whether Constables or other enemies are nearby) will decide whether or not the player must proceed onto the fleeing map, and escape a pursuit.  Perhaps not, and instead they have a choice to make about where they will rest that night – in a the house of a nearby ally, in a warm pub parlour or under a dripping hedge.

I wrote large parts of the ambush sequence early in the project – over a year ago – but for some reason, parts were uninviting.  One downside of using these systems is that they can feel repetitive when written under pressure: when I have the time to come up with ideas, these can be some of my favourite passages, with the strongest flavour of all.  After all, this is the core activity for a Steam Highwayman, isn’t it?

But I have just been finishing up the final choices and links in this sequence.  The ambushes for the guilds have been finished for a while.  An ambitious plan to include a range of independent steamers has been eliminated as unnecessary, and I have been correcting and splicing together the ambush sequences for the private steam carriages.  The passengers were completed some months ago.

This is another benefit of the ‘subroutine’ style of planning: I don’t have to write things in a linear sequence.  I do, however, have to read through to ensure that it all makes sense! Is it all too much? Well, that depends on a few things: the feeling of choice, the flow of the text and the rhythm of decisions. My playtesters are going to have to tell me their thoughts soon… Applications welcome.

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READER INPUT WANTED: Fetch Quests in Steam Highwayman IV

An open-world gamebook must contain variety.  If you’re asking your reader to stay with you for hours of gameplay, spread over months of reading, then you have to provide them with short, rewarding actions and longer, more challenging storylines.  I’ve been thinking about this balance in Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West a lot recently, as the length of the book and the number of different things I want to include are both really challenging me.

I have a tendency to inflate even small quests so it’s really important that when I can, I deliver tasty events in as few passages as possible.  This was something I always admired about Fabled Lands, and though I have wanted to create something richer and more atmospheric, I know I can go too far. And if I want to cover the entire map with adventures in around 1500 passages, I need to use them efficiently.

Now one criticism I had of my first gamebook was that there was a reliance on fetch-quests.  Since then I have done my best to avoid using them too much, but I’m coming round again.  There is something steady, predictable and rewarding about completing a simple find-and-deliver, delivering quick success and a boost to the reader’s confidence.  And just because the essential idea is straightforward, doesn’t mean the theme or the manner of the quest has to be…

So I’ve done a bit of work on two types of fetch-quest structures, aiming for the minimum number of passages to make them functional, which means that I can plan to include several in Princes of the West, scattered in among other sorts of quests and missions.

Specific Fetch Quests

The Specific Fetch Quest goes something like this: at Location A, which could be a passage such as an inn parlour or a freight yard, there’s a one-time-only option and an option limited by possession of a certain MacGuffin item.  Choosing the first option introduces you to a character or situation that requires a MacGuffin – you know the sort of valuable and indefinite thing I’m talking about.  A water purification control chip or a pewter falcon or whatever you like.  Perhaps the section includes clues to the MacGuffin’s location, or perhaps it doesn’t.  In the simplest form, you receive an exact location and your job is purely to go and get it, but it with a bit more complexity you can add some detective-work in here.  For example, the quest-giver could give you an approximate location, and you might have to visit several places on a map, or they could tell you that an individual has it, and then you’d have to find that person first.  Either way, a Codeword or a unique item acts as the key to obtain the MacGuffin when you eventually reach Location B.  There a conditional option gets you what you’re looking for, strips you of the Codeword or unique item and sends you back on your way to Location A to hand it over – this time using the second option.

Now the elegance here is in the minimal use of conditions.  Because the first option at Location A is one-time-only, so is the unique item, which effectively makes the conditional option at Location B also one-time only and the second option at Location A one-time-only.  This little fetch-quest needs only 3 passages, one tick-box and two unique items to function.  Nice.

Generic Fetch Quests

Now here’s something even simpler: a Generic Fetch Quest.  Presuming you use pre-existing locations, this only requires two passages and no unique items.  The idea here is that at a location such a market or roadside, you are commissioned to fetch an item – probably something with a bit of rarity to it, but it could be something relatively easy to find.  A tin of fruit or a fur coat or a boondoggle that could be bought at a market at a bit of a distance – not next-door.  Within passage QF2.1, a condition like “If you possess a boondoggle, turn to 801 immediately” responds to your solution of the quest and sends you to a reward passage.  This sort of fetch quest can be repeated over and over – which is more likely to be a problem than a benefit, but which can have uses.  For example, a Devon shopkeeper could tell you of his need to get hold of Cornish clotted cream for a specific customer, meaning that whenever you cross the Tamar, you might bring a pot with you and drop it off for a nice little illegal profit – such contraband being forbidden by Imperial edict, you see.  Perhaps this is prone to spamming, but if a reader is willing to leave all their possessions in a hollow tree or pub bedroom somewhere and fill their saddlebags with clotted cream, I think they probably deserve a multiple reward.

Rewards

And that is really the next part of the equation.  A reward for a specific quest is easier to invent: it could be a valuable item (clearly worth more than the effort of fetching the MacGuffin) or cash, or possibly even something more important like the Friendship of a character, access to further missions or locations, a stat-increase, a modification to your velosteam…  The list goes on. 

When creating something repeatable, it really is tricky not to mess this up.  The net gain has to be valuable enough to satisfy the reader but not so valuable as to break the game.  Sometimes I like a random table here: one time you might get given £2 in coin, but another time it might be a gold necklace, technically worth more but more bothersome as you have to find someone who will fence it for you – which is not that easy in Princes of the West. And how many are too many?  I have something like 120 locations in the current Steam Highwayman volume and really, every single one needs something interesting to happen there – either a mechanic like a repeatable ambush, a quest beginning, middle or end, or a minor encounter.  Empty locations are simply a waste of everyone’s time.  Right now I am actually struggling just to keep on top of what I have written, so I can’t tell you how many simple or complex fetch quests I actually have in Princes of the West. I’ll have to get back to you.

Now I’m pretty sure you have feelings about this style of quest, or the conditional structures I’ve drawn out about, or experiences in the earlier Steam Highwayman volumes that annoyed or pleased you. Perhaps you’ve got a better way of doing things or an idea to improve what I’ve written above.

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Toothy Braddock’s Gold

I wrote the first part of this quest around seven years ago, in Steam Highwayman: Smog & Ambuscade. Did I then dream how long it would take me to write the conclusion? Far from it! The original plan was to write a book every six months and complete the series in three years…

I maintain that I could keep to that speed if I didn’t have to earn a living in other ways. Over those seven years, there have been periods of full-time teaching, part-time teaching and supply work at three different schools. Most recently, I’ve been working part-time for my church, as well as providing personal tutoring for 11+ and GCSE students locally. I was actually doing that in 2017 as well!

And what a lot of other water has flowed under the bridge of my life. In 2017 I was recently-married, but childless. Now my wife and I have a full house of noisy, needy youngsters aged 1, 3 and 5.

Yet I still dream of hidden treasure… There are a few people to blame for that: Robert Louis Stevenson, clearly, but also Enid Blyton, who wasn’t above stashing a box of jewels, coins or contraband in the occasional cave, ruin, castle, boat cabinet, hollow tree etc. This weekend my daughter began reading The Castle of Adventure and, besides the paternal pride of seeing my own child keen and able to read ‘chapter books’, I smelled the wind of a whole new mode of life… She is now old enough for book recommendations – and that means, for the shaping of her mind through stories she can read for herself.

I’m off to the bookshop.

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You old rogue, you.

Go on, Steam Highwayman. That’s what you’re all about.

Today I’ve been working on the main quests – more about those soon! But to fill up time I’ve just been ‘colouring in’ a few of the many ambushes in Princes of the West. There are so many rich people to rob and so many poor ones to help: sometimes, the simplest actions are the most Steam Highwayman-ish.

Today’s count: 901 passages complete (95525 words), 31 passages written today (4506 words), 2152 links in total so far.

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Thirsty workers

A good mechanic – as everyone knows – is worth their weight in gold. For a while I’ve had this idea that the Steam Highwayman will need to carry liquor about on the back of the Ferguson, and even planned in the barrel panniers as another customisation. But rather than simply add them as a dryly purchasable option at some Freight Yard, I’ve made a little feature out of getting them fitted.

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Barrels of trouble in Princes of the West

It was great to be at Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 at the weekend: there’s nothing so galvanising as spending time with fans of Steam Highwayman and other gamebook writers. My daughter is also back to school, so I’ve returned to my library-visiting schedule, which is the most productive writing pattern I’ve found for some time. And today, for some reason not entirely clear to me, I’ve latched onto the liquor smuggling system within Princes of the West.

This is one of several systems that are almost independent of the main quests, but could still prove to be quite a satisfying part of the gameplay. You’ll need to get some barrel panniers fitted to your velosteam (not sure where yet), and then source liquor, either directly from a hidden distillery, from smugglers bringing it ashore, or by smuggling it across the sea yourself. Maybe you’ll need a safe seaside cave to stash that in… But once you have a couple of firkins (that’s a nine-gallon barrel) strapped to the Ferguson, you should be able to find a willing customers. Cornwall will pay you a fair price, but should you manage to get it across the border into Devon, then you might have the beginnings of a very lucrative scheme. Just be cautious about whom you approach… The bounty on smugglers is worth more to some landlords than the potential profit of undutied brandy.

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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.

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Decapod distractions

No, I’ve not been obsessed with lobsters for a whole month. But it is a full four weeks since I have been able to put any time into Steam Highwayman IV: Princes of the West, currently in draft. Since Delemand the Bull, I’ve been busy with my other work, ministering at church, raising my family and taking some holiday.

But today I’m back with a vengeance. A rest is good: by the end of March I was getting dry and rather frustrated with the difficulties of structuring a project as large as Steam Highwayman IV. A view weeks without directly thinking about it has allowed some things to rise to the surface – and one of those is lobster-potting.

Steam Highwayman was never meant to be simply a combat-based robbery simulator: the name was the best fit for an adventure within a realist Steampunk world. Originally I planned parallel tracks, a la Fabled Lands, for your main character: you could be a gambler, a rat-catcher, a chimney-sweep, a detective etc… In the end, each of these has become a minor quest within the Steam Highwayman world – and to be honest, I doubt Steam Ratcatcher would have grabbed as committed an audience or proven to be as sustainable a project.

But Cornwall isn’t Cornwall without the coast, and the coast isn’t the coast without fishing. Or lobsters. Taking Steam Highwayman to sea, not just along a river, like in the first three books, will prove to be a big piece of work. Fabled Lands and Legendary Kingdoms have both done it, with varied success – some of which I mean to mimic. But unless the Steam Highwayman can skipper a craft out beyond (or below…?) the Imperial blockade and bring back contraband, I’ll miss the greatest opportunity of a Cornish gamebook: smuggling. And the flipside of smuggling is fishing.

So lobster-potting – which is a little more about patience, rather more static, and certainly as luck-based – is my starting place. And to be honest, isn’t there something very steampunk about lobsters? I just read The Swordfish and the Star here in the library, which was really a sort of third-person collected memoir of Cornish life, and a great deal of it was about the hard lives of western Cornish fishermen.

It’s also been a bit of time to take stock. My self-built website shop, the Highwayman’s Hamper, has begun to make profit, and I’ve been sending off the remaining copies of the Gormley-Watt Touring Guide. I’ve invested some of those takings (each sale makes me double what an Amazon or bookshop sale makes me) into a trader’s spot at the upcoming Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 in Ealing, hosted by Jon Green. At this rate, I might not have too many remaining Touring Guides to sell, but I have a lot of loose maps, and it’s always great to be present in person at this event: it is really the only convention for gamebooks anywhere. Two years ago, I was bringing samples of Saga… Back at Fighting Fantasy Fest 2, my first, I was dropping flyers for the Kickstarter for Steam Highwayman: Smog & Ambuscade and giving free samples to influencers…! I’m very grateful to Jon for all he’s done to keep the flame burning in the recent decades, as he bridged the gap between the first golden age of gamebooks and the current renaissance, as well as running the convention.

In fact, if you fancy supporting him and the subject takes your fancy, he is currently kickstarting the most recent in his series of Ace Gamebooks: Shakespeare Vs Cthulu: What Dreams May Come.

But I’ve got to get back to lobsters before I can get onto Kickstarter again. I love running a crowd-funding project – I’ve discovered that they’re a part of this career of being an independent author that I actually really enjoy – and I’d love to get SH4 up there before the end of the year… So I’d better finish with the lobster-potting, the smuggling, the ambushes, the main quest, the inter-book links, the beer descriptions, the illustration briefs, the cover illustration brief, the marketing preparations, the playtesting, the issuing to playtesters, the editing and correcting…

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The original and best

I’ve been working hard on Steam Highwayman IV over the past months – having reached about 50,000 words last week. Some rearrangement in my work schedule means that I can now spend around 5 hours on both Monday and Tuesday in the library at East Ham, where there is a ‘silent study’ (‘work-from-the-library’) zone with a great, productive atmosphere. My daughter and I take the bus up to her school, I drop her off, take a fast fifteen-minute walk and set down to work until it’s time to collect her. Some days I even manage to eat lunch.

But looking ahead to your adventure through Cornwall and Devon doesn’t mean I should ignore the beginning of this whole saga. I was recently reminded of the biblical ‘law of first mention’ – that where an idea is first mentioned in scripture is the best place to start with your understanding of it. Well, the Steam Highwayman was first mentioned in Smog & Ambuscade, as was the Ferguson velosteam, Dr Smollet, many of my mechanisms and much of the world-building. In short, this is where it all began.

So I hope you can forgive me if I don’t yet think that enough people have met the Steam Highwayman, or realised that they themselves can don the tricorne and spend an evening robbing the rich and riding the midnight roads. If they did, surely many more would put aside their mesmerising devices, stop scrolling and start rolling!

In an attempt to boost sales, I’ve decided to make a short-term, limited offer. I have multiple A2 maps and some custom dice remaining from Kickstarter rewards, so increased printing costs have forced me to increase the price of the gamebook, I think I’ve made a great package in the Steam Highwayman Starter Pack. And who knows, perhaps this is a great opportunity for you, my long-established supporter, to buy a book, map and dice for that friend you’ve wanted to share the adventure with for all this time?