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!
I’ve just managed to put two full days into editing Princes of the West and it is exciting to feel the draft nearing a finished state. I’ll give you a window into the process…
I sat down on Monday at around 9am – after tidying away breakfast for the family – and began to work on the Introduction. These pages take a lot of focus – they need to be clear while setting the atmosphere, cover all the crucial systems while not boring a player. For some readers, they’re the first thing they encounter – for others, they’re a reference to find answers for rule queries. Some of you will no doubt skip them, having played Steam HIghwayman before – and then have to return to them to see what exactly they say about the Devon Music Tour…
It took me most of the day to get the Introduction how I wanted it. I also corrected some small issues at the front of the book – typos in the copyright section, a missing icon on one of the maps – while crunching celery and raw carrot to stave off my sugar craving. I incorporated a change to the combat rules that I hope will make fights less punishing after a recommendation from one of you with a background in statistics and responded to a set of thoughts from the first playtesters who saw the draft in April and May 2025.
I’ve begun an investigation into strange grey lines that accompany some of the spot illustrations… These are pesky, spoiling the monochrome clarity of the pages, and unpredictable. Why do they appear in some places and not others? I’m not sure yet – but they also turned up in the previous print of The Reeking Metropolis, so I think they’re an artefact of the conversion into pdf…
While pursuing this, I began formatting the acknowledgements section of Princes – and would have liked to simply copy and paste the formatting from Metropolis – except that – now I reveal a secret – I lost the print-ready .pub file of The Reeking Metropolis some time ago… The version I have is some way off the final printed version, with errors, placeholder images and no paratexts at the back – including acknowledgements. That’s one reason I haven’t released an errata and revised edition of The Reeking Metropolis before now. All my searches on the old laptop – and my various googledrives – turned up blank.
But with the focus of a sunny Monday morning and an empty house (my wife and children had left to go to a home-education meetup), a faint bell rang in my head… Didn’t I use a USB stick for a while? I dug around to see which ones I could find and unearthed a few from odd places – bedside drawer, spare wire pot, spare board-game-piece box.
And there amongst teaching resources was SH3.5 – and my heart leapt with gratitude and joy! I’d just read the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son in Luke’s Gospel to my children, so I had to rejoice. And make multiple copies of the file.
I’ll be releasing a tidier errata list for all previous volumes of Steam Highwayman when I fulfil this project as well as making sure any corrections are incorporated in newly-printed versions.
And many of you actually backed The Reeking Metropolis and are named in the acknowledgements. So – here’s an important point – unless you tell me otherwise, each backer will be acknowledged in the book by: previously-chosen backer name; or Kickstarter provided name. That’s the plan, anyway.
I’ve messaged those of you who are looking to have a Wanted Poster created as a frontispiece for your book (s) and already received the first image in reply – a fearsome, but somewhat foppish, Italian claimant to the title of the Steam Highwayman. If anyone is thinking of the upgrade, it’s not too late. I think these are a great way to personalise your books.
And among the corrections I completed was an inconsistency in the naming of the Cornish revolutionaries. You know how those splinter groups are – barely able to agree on a name, let alone a coherent policy – but in this case I still had fragments of older names betraying my own struggle to give them a name. Were they to be the Free Defenders of Kernow, or the Defenders of Free Kernow? I even found myself referring to them as the Free Forces of Kernow at one point. And then there is the tin of fruit / tinned fruit fiasco. Boy oh boy.
That’s about one day’s work, finishing at 5pm. Then on Tuesday I began at a similar time and focused on the main gameplay passages, screwing myself into the seat until I had reached 500 of the 2250 or so… The sort of mistakes in here varied from typos (nice and easy) to missing passages… For example, passage 147 was entirely absent from the draft but I reckoned I had written it as I had a vague memory of some of the dialogue. I found it in the gdoc draft, pasted it in, matched the formatting, shuffled nearby passages, removed whitespace, replaced larger spot illustrations with smaller ones, renumbered the page tops and sighed in relief that I hadn’t needed to increase the page count. Then there was a broken link that sent me back to the very first part of Princes I planned and wrote in October 2023. Images follow.
The notebook is labelled up for reference, so I found it exactly where it should be and found the original flowchart/network sketch – with annoying gaps in the numbering. But I was able to reconstruct and correct the flow. This is a location that can be reached from two directions and can bounce the player back the way they came, but in the interest of saving passages I used a noted passage mechanic to identify the direction of travel… It was all such a good plan except that at 278 I had instructed a player Wanted by the Haulage Guild to proceed directly to… 278. Doh!
There was a passage I had already passed dealing with the event, but it spat the player out in the wrong direction… And oh yes, another passage with the right orientation. Phew. Plug it in.
The other day on the Discord chat someone came to me with a broken link – they knew it was possible to meet acrobats somewhere in Smog & Ambuscade because I referred to the encounter in later books – and in fact I’ve used the codeword you gain early in the main quest of Princes – but they couldn’t see how to get there. I investigated and discovered that back when editing Smog, around a decade(!!) ago, I had cut a link to save passages – and inadvertently isolated the acrobat encounter, meaning that no-one has ever been able to honestly access it and gain either the fun codeword or the NIMBLENESS +1 bonus… Doh!
Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that.
These wiring issues are almost unavoidable in my writing process. I track my ins and outs and links as best I can but I have to recognise that my method is not infallible. Another reason I’m so grateful for the help provided by readers and playtesters.
I’m sometimes recommended software to try and write in, but even a platform as resilient as Twine struggles with a 1000+, let alone a 2000+, gamebook with the density of variables I use. I’ve certainly improved since writing Smog and I’ve realised that modelling sections on paper is the most reliable thing I can do… So the next two books should be easy to write, eh? And have no errors.
I also began work on the final map that will be included in the Touring Guide – a map of Plymouth – so that feels nice. 2 of the 4 are complete. There’s a bit more drawing to do for the guide itself, particularly some pub illustrations. But I’m certainly nearing the end of this phase.
Which will give me chance to get to the standalone adventures I’m still aching to write – Harvest of Death and Dark Satanic Mills. I had originally thought I could do these while the book was out with playtesters but that hasn’t been how it has worked! You’ll get them, don’t worry. I’ve even referenced two other standalone adventures buried in Princes – they’ve been spotted by at least one eagle-eyed playtester.
Hello everyone. It’s been a good fortnight for Princes of the West. What have I been up to?
Checking in on proofreaders and playtesters ahead of their May deadline.
Working on the maps and guidebook
Unpacking the first printed rewards!
The proofreading and playtesting team have been wrapping up their work and I’m incredibly grateful. I’ve ended up with … around 700 issues to respond to! These aren’t all errors or mistakes and very few of them were gameplay problems, but I’m grateful for all the time that has been spent by keen supporters checking my work, both minimising the mistakes that could cause problems for you when you play the books and getting the pages looking their best.
My plan is to begin the editing in corrections and changes in May – so I should have begun by next update.
The original A2 map design I made was just a bit too short for the map design, so I spent a bit of time on a large ipad doing a digital tracing and drawing to extend the map eastwards. I was pretty happy with that, so I pushed on with the design and ended up with a great-looking design that is nearly finished. Rather like the map for The Reeking Metropolis, I’m including a gazette of locations on the map itself, with grid references for some of the important ones. There’s also going to be at least one in-world advertisement filling in gaps and adding to the lore. Perhaps I can bury a clue in there too?
I also drew up a map for Dartmoor, which is going to be one of the smaller maps in the pack. Whereas in the first one I had three gamebooks to map and offered three A2 maps, this time I have a single – massive – volume, so there’ll be one A2 map and three smaller ones covering different regions or sections of gameplay – I won’t say more right now.
I’ve also been writing the booklet that will accompany the maps and that has given me the giggles, I can tell you. The in-world creator of these guides seems to be a bit clueless about the political situation, though reliable on where to find cheap coalgas for the velosteam.
In my previous update I mentioned the arrival of the first printed rewards – the Adventurer’s Log. The delivery of these was far from simple but I got my hands on 300 copies after ten days or so. They look great and the responses I’ve had really vindicate my decision to put time into producing them. In a way, they act as a little ambassador for the whole project, giving an idea of the sort of quest content in the four books so far.
What’s next?
Throughout May, the 100 Endings Book Club, hosted by Duncan Thomson on Discord and Reddit, are holding a playthrough of Steam Highwayman. I mean to be participating in a couple of AMA (ask-me-anything) sessions as well as hanging out on both forums to advise, hint, tease and generally enjoy my books through other players’ eyes. You’re all welcome to join in – and if any of you are desperately keen to join in but haven’t actually got copies yet, let me know and I’d be willing to split your bundle.
We have a team of around fifteen keen playtesters and proofreaders currently at work, already exploring Devon and Cornwall through the passages of Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. It was a great feeling to have other eyes – and enthusiastic ones at that – on the text again, after many months of solo endeavour.
What’s the point? Well, along with getting some feedback on macro gameplay like difficulty and pacing, I hope to squash as many of these as possible…
The dreaded broken link – every gamebook enthusiast’s nightmare. In a book of 2251 passages with almost 10,000 links, there is a lot of opportunity for mistakes.
The proofing and playtesting window is two months, which gives me time to work on all the other parts of your reward bundle. This week I have been working on the Adventurer’s Logbook…
That means revisiting Highways and Holloways and writing out a Hints and Achievements list like I did for Smog and Ambuscade. It’s not a quick job but it’s very enjoyable – I get to enjoy reading all the quests I wrote in 2018, many of which I’ve forgotten. I mean to do something better than a simple printed list – perhaps a table layout for one or more dates or ticks to say, yes, I achieved this on this date during my fourth playthrough or something… It’s not quite certain yet. For the sake of originality, I was looking at a fun paper size (eg long and slim, like DL) and maybe ringbound, but due to cost of both postage and printing, I’m more likely to go for a stapled A5 booklet at the moment. But we’ll see.
Perhaps something like this – this was the DL layout. Either way, the list of achievements is a great way to advertise the book. What can you do in a Steam Highwayman adventure? A lot more than defeat some fantasy monsters, rob a dungeon and defeat a wizard, that’s for sure, in both variety and length. These lists of achievements don’t tell the whole story of the adventures in the books – both the prose and the gameplay are needed for that – but they give a great flavour.
Since the last update I completed the formatting of the interior of the book. It is a whopper – currently at 2251 sections and 426 pages. This took me so long for a couple of reasons:
– To maintain consistency, I’m using the same format and software as for the previous Steam Highwayman books. These were completed on a copy of Microsoft Publisher 2007 on a laptop belonging to my wife that was bought in either 2007 or 2008… Once I’m into the swing of things, there are no problems with memory, but I have to treat it fairly carefully to avoid crashes, battery issues and so on!
– I also go through each page manually, editing the layout of the options, spacing the passages in the columns and choosing and fitting spot illustrations (some call them ‘fillers’ but Russ always called them ‘spots’) to make up the space and break up the wall of text. This is also a chance to edit and improve, either editing my writing or fixing links, filling in the shops and changing values for balance. To complete the 2251 passages, this took around 10 days – something like 60 hours.
What then? I have made a first stab at a new Character Sheet (or 3 sheets including the Devon Music Tour) to account for some changes in mechanics. These are still not finalised. Then I looked at refreshing the introduction and rules, but, to be honest, I was pretty frazzled by that stage! These rules may need a bit more attention – and also some inputs.
One of the particular inputs I am thinking about is the fight rules. I have two alternate fight systems – smalls changes to the essential rules – worked out with help from a backer who knows these books almost as well as I do – and I’m intending to share them with you and with anyone who wants to playtest, to see whether they actually improve the gameplay.
So my plan is to share the electronic interior of the book with any of you who want to proof it or playtest it – in fact, you should have already had my invitation to participate by email, and if not, please check your spam… This leaves a lot still to do, but it means I can shift mode away from the very focussed writing, editing and formatting into the production of some of the other rewards. Specifically, I will take a look at the large maps and get them printed as the next phase of the project. They take a long time to fold, so the sooner I have them, the better! Then I’ll move on to look at the logbook and a refreshed Companion, and also find time to produce the Harvest of Death and Dark, Satanic Mills that I promised you.
I also get to do some drawing – like the image of the Red Tiller above – perhaps reminiscent of the Blue Anchor in Helston?
I’ve managed to work three long days in the last fortnight – last Tuesday and then this Monday and Tuesday just past. That put the formatted document of The Princes of the West at around 70% complete: I have reached passage 1500 and there are not yet 300 pages.
During the process of pasting in the 800 or so passages, I’ve made countless small edits. Some are responses to comments made by two of you – Andreas and Oliver – from as long as a year ago. Some are edits to systems that I intended to fix months ago and left hanging. For example, as I have reached each beer passage, I’ve checked the possible rumours against a long list. The list was originally thirty rumours long, but when I wrote the smuggling module, I had to include another twenty or so rumours. These needed dropping into the most-appropriate pubs – and logging, so that each was hearable the right number of times – normally in two or three different pubs.
I even invented a new item (something I really try not to do any more) to help give colour to the velosteam repair system, which has felt a bit repetitive. But the rarer or top-level engineering components were too tricky to get hold of – the titanium alloy particularly – and I wanted to create something that could be bought in a workshop of forge, so that mending your own velosteam was once again the cheaper option.
But today I’ve just sat down (7:37pm) to write this update for you. My eldest three are in bed (wait – Emmanuel has just returned to the living room and is swaying towards me without looking me in the eye – he is hoping I will let him lie down on the sofa) – and the baby is with Cheryl getting to sleep. Today I have done my best not to think about being productive at all.
I’m trying to re-learn how to sabbath!
On a Friday? Some of you might ask. Or, what’s that? I’m trying to take one day in seven off – a day without work. After all, if it worked for Almighty God, it should work for me. But the challenge for me is that a Sunday is typically a work day – I might rise at five, finish preparing a sermon before breakfast, feed the family, help get the children ready, travel to church, prepare for the service, run the service, preach, pray with and for church members or visitors for a couple of hours after church and then close up (if it’s my turn) around three or four in the afternoon. We typically head over to my inlaws’ house then for some child-friendly tv and a family meal.
My Saturdays often include planned activities or jobs to do as well, so Friday has become the day when I can permit myself to achieve nothing – that’s the key. To tell myself that it is alright if, one day in the week, I aim to get nothing done. I might still prepare three meals (as lightly as I can!), change six or seven nappies, but if I limit the housework to ‘fill and turn on the dishwasher’, then I can both enjoy being with my family and even get some relaxation time for myself. Which today meant enjoying a couple of glasses of merlot, playing my new 12-string guitar (a gift from the church for my recent 40th birthday), a lot of lego with the boys, lots of cuddles and stretches with Raphael, my youngest, who is learning to take steps, and enjoying a good book.
Another birthday present (along with the wine and the guitar) was a book voucher. I headed to Foyles in Charing Cross on Saturday – a rainy, tourist-thronged afternoon – and bought a copy of the Stranger Things Choose Your Own Adventure, which has already disappointed me (although I’m new to the franchise) and something far more predictably pleasurable – a volume of Ursula K Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, called Orsinia: Revolution is in the Air.
Now Ursula is a bit of a friend of mine. A one-sided friendship, perhaps, but I enjoy her company enough to re-read everything I have by her. I have a bruised copy of The Dispossessed with a letter from a good friend folded into it after I lent it to him twenty years ago (it came back about a year later) and I have a school paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea and I have a hardback copy of Tales from Earthsea that I began transliterating into the feanorian tengwar in coloured ink, right on the page, and a Gollancz paperback of Always Coming Home, which reads to me like a dream I might have had.
I wasn’t really aware of Orsinia, although as soon as I saw the title I recognised that China Mieville probably was when writing about the third city in The City and the City. And I’m about four-fifths of the way through the novel, Malafrena, which is the first part of the collection. It reads a lot like The Dispossessed, but set in a fictional nineteenth-century central Europe – in a sort of Ruritanian cardboard kingdom that the Steam Highwayman is on the very cusp of taking a flight to. In fact, I have felt like I am reading set in my own ‘world that never was but should have been’. There isn’t really much steampunk in Orsinia, but it has all the ingredients, just as my world has – social inequality, rural and urban tensions, industrial revolution, a growing labour movement, high society, free agent adventurers…
Cheryl asked me how I was finding it. I said, a bit slow, and it is. The first fifth of the book is the coming-of-age for three cousins of the rural gentry – it reminded me quite a lot of Tolstoy – and a large part of the book is relationships, rather than directly-propounded philosophy or social ideation, like The Dispossessed. But slow is exactly what I’ve needed – although I read quickly – because it means my mind is resting, having to focus on descriptions of rural life or quasi-european court social interactions, because if I were to skip on until the action, I would be writing off a very large amount of the book.
I do wonder who else has read it. Any of you out there? Anyone fancy a try after this strange recommendation?
I intend to finish the paste-up by my next update. I won’t be on schedule to fulfil by end of February, but I think I will be able to share an electronic version with keen proof-readers and playtesters. Watch your inboxes!
By next update I intend to:
– finish formatting passages 1501-2263
– complete the introduction, together with rules for new systems
– complete the end paratexts – adventure sheet, beer list, Devon music tour, codeword list etc
– I paid Ben for the finalised internal illustrations. I’m now only holding funds for the printing of the books and the extras.
– I’ve spent four days and several late-night stints formatting the book – so far, I’m up to passage 722. This is essentially a long, careful paste-up, as I take sections of 100 passages from my gdoc and paste them into Microsoft publisher, and then work through them in order, checking lineation, reformatting bold and italic fonts, which I use a lot, adding in a lot of invisible tables and setting in the minor and major illustrations. I think I’m now about ⅓ of the way through this long and painstaking job.
– Rather than correct the rumour engine from the outside, I’ve been correcting it as I go through the formatting: each time I reach a beer or other rumour passage, I can select which of the rumours to link in from a list of nearly 60.
– Likewise, as I’ve reached shops and places to trade, I’ve logged the items to be bought and sold so that everything needed can be accessed somewhere. Prices are high in parts of Cornwall, cut off behind the Imperial blockade – but there’s money to be made if you know where to offload your loot!
– I’ve checked the codewords to passage 700, but there are more to do.
– I’ve checked the inter-book links and written a missing link that takes you on a railway journey to London.
The plan is to continue working at this pace until the book is formatted. It’s taking longer than I had hoped because the book is … longer than expected.
But being so careful as I go does have the benefit of giving me the chance to comb my way through the passages. I’ve made plenty of corrections as I’ve gone along – typos, bad links, duplications and so on – but also edited and improved the clarity of the writing in some places and, I think, improved the game in a few minor ways.
It’s been pleasant to re-read sections that I wrote a long time ago and enjoy the story from the inside as well. There is a broad distribution of sections across the map too – passage 300-399 in one area and 400-499 in another – so it’s a bit like travelling across the region as well. Coupled with memories from our trip to Cornwall and Devon in September, I’ve really been in the saddle in my mind.
What next?
– I’ll be continuing to format the document! This is probably another 10 days work – so it may be March before I’m ready to send or share it with proofreaders.
A happy new year to each of you faithful backers! Thanks for your support and patience through 2025 🙂 Here’s a New Year and an approaching end to this project. What have I done and what is still to do?
Since last update, I:
– recovered from the flu. Thanks for all the messages of sympathy and support, the prayer and wishes for our recovery.
– completed the massive item survey which lists every instance of each item used in Princes of the West. There are 321 unique items so far in the series and keeping them in order is an ever-growing challenge! Some are one-use quest items, gained in a single location and tied to a specific event, while others are useful for both quests and trade, can be collected in different places and have importance differences in prices or availability tied to the story of your adventure. I have tried not to bloat the book with more stuff for the sake of it, but a certain amount of crucially Cornish and Devonian content has crept in…
– completed two black-and-white internal maps for the book. These are adapted from the large map that flew as a background in the adverts and videos for my Kickstarter, but it has taken some time to get them right. It goes like this.
Every gamebook needs a map, but an open-world gamebook needs one even more. While I, the author, know exactly where I am at any given time, feedback from readers tells me that navigating the world of Steam Highwayman is both challenging and rewarding – but certainly a big job. Very well. That means that a map has to be clear and unambiguous.
A black-and-white version of the large map (which is not completely finished) would be hard to read – least of all, due to the need to shrink it. In fact, the shape of Devon and Cornwall is also an issue – I struggled for a long while before landing on the current solution – which is an idiosyncratic re-arrangement of the Cornish peninsula, proudly skewiff. I hope it doesn’t end up being too confusing to navigate with.
I took the outline from the big map, chopped it up, relabelled the towns and other crucial locations and then sent it back over to the ipad for bordering… Then I did the same for Devon, which didn’t need spinning by 45 degrees and added in a few scrawled notes for flavour.
I think they are what I need. Legibility is key – a map that fits on a 10” x 8” page simply can’t hold as much as a big A2 spread – and that means that there is certainly a benefit to ordering the big maps beside their beauty. Some more playtesting will, I hope, reveal whether there are other changes that need to be made or more information that should best be added.
– completed a skill survey to see which attributes are tested most frequently and to try to balance their difficulty. This is not my speciality but I have had some good advice in the past which is getting baked into this stage.
– fitted and formatted the first 50 passages into the document that will produce our print copies of Princes of the West. This means fiddling with all the margins, the arrangements for tables in shops, dice rolls and other options, ordering the early pages for the introductions and maps and getting it ready to import the other 2200 or so passages.
That brings me to a couple of things I need to tell you! Firstly – the book is going to be bigger than expected. Probably nearer 400 pages than 300… The increase in print cost is covered by your pledges and the contingency built into the funding, but it might make some of the postage costs increase. I’m looking into this.
Secondly, I’m several months behind where I had hoped to be. I could rush and try to get the books to you by the end of February or March, but it is very likely that they will contain errors that we will all regret. No-one wants a big page of errata to look at on a website when they’re trying to play a paper gamebook.
My current thinking is – press ahead with the formatting of the pdf and squash as many bugs as possible; use placeholder images where necessary – although Ben has completed the illustrations, some of them need re-formatting before I can use them; get a pdf copy to any of you who would like to playtest it as soon as I can. This is different to how I’ve done things before and it would not be a real release of an e-book – but it has a couple of upsides. Firstly, anyone who wants to get started on the adventure can do so, importing a current character or continuing a current game. Secondly, that means more eyes spotting problems – whether typos, broken links or other issues. How does that sound?
I really want to do the book justice after more than 2 years of writing, so rushing it out now is not a great option. I also need more time to complete the other pieces of the project, such as the logbook and the two standalone stories I promised you! I thought I’d be able to write those while the book was in playtesting, but all my writing time has been taken up with finishing Princes of the West and tying up the many loose ends I had left.
So what’s next? I can answer that directly. In the next fortnight I mean to:
– Continue importing the draft into the publisher document and making corrections where necessary.
– Triple-check (I’ve done it twice already!) the codeword list
– Check all connections to other Steam Highwayman books – written and unwritten
– Fix the rumour engine (I’ve had to write a lot more rumours since I first did this – so some need to be unplugged and some need to be plugged in)
– Write a little roadkill passage for section 51 (which turned out to be almost duplicate 😉 )
A painful fortnight. Last Monday (8th December), I spent several hours planning the sequence that has given me the greatest amount of trouble in the whole book: Lundy. It is based around some real history and a couple of nice gameplay ideas that have been with me for over two years, yet I’d not completed them on account of the complexity of the idea, my dissatisfaction with my various attempts and something doggedly frustrating about the whole section. But I collated all my previous drafts, cut some pieces out of the main draft, replanned some flowcharts and prepared to write.
Then on Tuesday, I wrote solidly for around six hours, putting down more than three thousand words. And as I steamed into the final passage – which is actually a fortuitous reuniting with the Ferguson after a long velosteamless sequence – I felt a heaviness come upon me. It was the flu.
Rather than being able to celebrate that the final piece of a very troublesome draft had at last been completed, I rang up everyone I was committed to for the next few days, cancelled everything and battened down the hatches. It got me – it got my wife – it got three of my four small children. Think of sleepless, feverish toddlers who can’t say what they need or want – frustrated parents who can hardly keep their own tempers – a writer kept from his draft – a mother soldiering on for the sake of her loved ones.
It was tragic. And no choice was involved whatsoever.
In the last two days I’ve been recovering. Today I managed to renumber all the passages from that blitz last Tuesday and import them into the main draft – which now stands at a colossal 2271 passages. Then after doing that, I’ve begun the final item check – testing that each of the items is where it should be. This is prior to setting the shops right – more than 50 of them – where you should be able to offload your loot and buy supplies for mending your vel and keeping your fires stoked. As well as crucial stuff like cough medicine.
I’m considerably behind where I wanted to be: I hoped to be able to release a late-playtesting version to you before Christmas – there has already been some playtesting since April this year – and I had hoped to be well into the formatting of the main book, as well as further along in the production of the extras. Nonetheless, I’m happy with what I’ve managed to do – particularly considering the flu.
Will this effect my completion date? Realistically, I think that February would be miraculous – but I don’t think it will be long after. I will need to look back at my main project timeline with fresh eyes and book in the time for everything before I can be more specific. Ben is in the process of drawing the final spot illustrations – his main pages are finished – and the main map is close to completion too – it just needs a little more labelling.
I won’t be doing anything else on the project now until the New Year – I’m taking a break from the saddle – so next update is due 16.1.26. Thanks for all your support and patience – Princes of the West is going to be a gamebook for the record books.
