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Update 30: Princes of the West now fully edited – wow!

Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West

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
  • Complete acknowledgements
  • Re-write blurb
  • Chase outstanding Wanted Poster images
  • Complete final A4 map
  • Order A4 maps
  • Order packaging for extras

Next update due: 30.7.26

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Update 29: Wheels of Cheese and some Essextraordinary Shenanigans coming up

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!
  • complete the Touring Guide and order the prints!
  • complete the maps and order them too!
  • finalise shipping costs!

Next update due: 16.7.26

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Update 24: A look at the big map

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.

And on the project?

  • Continue the map pack and guidebook
  • Complete the big map
  • Begin correcting the text of Princes of the West

Next update due: 8.5.26

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Update 22: Logbook sent to the printer

On Tuesday morning I ordered three hundred copies of the Adventurer’s Logbook with my printer.  That feels great.  To know that one of the many components of the rewards is complete and will soon be in my hands is a big relief – it feels like I am on the downhill slope at last.

It was a lot of fun to create.  Time-consuming, yes, but it meant that I got to skim through all four of my books and check that my notes were accurate, meaning that within the last two or three weeks, I have effectively filled my head with every single Steam Highwayman achievement and escapade – and it makes me very glad and proud.  Sorry, perhaps, that almost ten years’ work can be read in a fortnight, but happy with the quality.

Although I produced hint sequences for the most of Highways and Holloways, there wasn’t space to include this amount of content in the logbook.  I’ll release these digitally later, rather like the 94 things to do in Smog and Ambuscade I created a while ago.  This was also taking a lot of time, so I haven’t yet created full hint sequences for The Reeking Metropolis or Princes of the West.

Still, I was able to grade each achievement on its complexity – largely to do with how many dice rolls or unique items are needed to achieve each one.  A simple system of stars indicates each achievement’s difficulty.

After finishing, I edited some typos and made some corrections to Princes of the West that I had found as I read through it.  The team of proofreaders and playtesters are doing a fab job – thankyou to each of you reading this – and in a few weeks I’ll be collating everything and doing a final edit.

I began editing the Players Companion to update it to include the write-in information for Princes of the West.  There’s a lot!  So far I’ve begun by listing codewords and possession boxes – of which there are around thirty.

So what next?  I mean to continue editing the Companion, hopefully finishing that by next update, together with working on the maps and guidebook.  I might even get to Harvest of Death.

This update is early because I really mean to be offline tomorrow!  It’s been a mega-busy week and today took the biscuit, so I don’t want to have any jobs on my plate when I (eventually) get up tomorrow morning.

Next update due: 10.4.26

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Update 19 – Live Free or Die

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

Next update due: 27.2.26

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Rhinos and Pills

I’ve put in several solid days and a few evenings this fortnight.  What’s happened to the draft?  I have…

  • Begun to reorganise and check the rumours
  • Complained about the quality of some copper
  • Added some rhinos, filling in a great Cornish location, connecting up a mechanic that I had pre-written and creating a new friendship.  The rhinos even get an illustration.
  • Put a trap in an otherwise-helpful location…
  • Written a party in Barnstaple
  • Created a network selling performance-enhancing pills…  This has quite a backstory.
  • Written the final beer – with some choices in exactly how you receive it, which was fun.
  • Continued the list of achievements for The Reeking Metropolis.
  • Worked on the touring guide to accompany Princes of the West.
  • Filled in a brewery,
  • Used a quay.
  • Removed some flowers.
  • Cut a fishing trip (there’s already plenty of fish)
  • Checked and corrected the border crossings
  • Checked and corrected the Solidarity Point systems
  • Cut rabbits

That means I haven’t completed some of the tasks I wanted to last update.  Lundy is still to complete, although several of the modules listed above relate to it directly.  I haven’t corrected anyone’s inconsistent accent.  That’s all to come.  But I’m getting closer and closer to the moment when I can stop.

Right now there’s a crying baby on my lap, so I’m going to stop here.

Next update due: 19.12.25

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Kickstarter Update 7: At the keyboard on a hot afternoon

Here’s an update on progress so far on the Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West project.  What’s happened in the two weeks since the campaign ended?

– Pledges have all been collected and I’m awaiting the transfer of funds to complete – it looks like it’s in process, but my bank hasn’t notified me yet.

– I’ve followed up where I can with late backers and a few people whose payments didn’t come through.

– I’ve also had a flurry of sales of my old stock of the maps for Smog & Ambuscade, Highways & Holloways and The Reeking Metropolis – so these have been sent off in the post.

– I’ve been working on the codeword check  Codewords are a key component of the logic sequences in the quests, so they have to be right, and that also means checking codewords from other books that become relevant here in Princes of the West.  If your previous playthrough has ticked Amalgam, Amphibious or Bolster, then you’ll have some nice bonuses coming your way.

– I’ve spent a large amount of time on a quest survey – essentially, working through the entire draft, checking which passages are parts of which quest or event, and building up to checking that each one is a) finished and b) good.  I’ve already cut out a few orphan passages (without any inward links) that survived from earlier drafts of quests, freeing up about 5 passages’ worth of space.  This is also directly linked to the codeword check.

– The Item check – this has begun.  It’s a huge piece of work, like the codewords.  There are more than 300 unique items in the four books so far – some linked to quests, some purchasable or good for trade, and many that are both!  I love creating fun items, but I have to limit myself…

– I’ve begun creating and formatting the .pub document that will become the submitted print .pdf.  In the name of consistency, I’m using the same software and even the same old laptop for this that I did with the previous volumes: an old edition of Microsoft Publisher which formats things exactly how I like it – but once SH5 and 6 are done, I think it’ll probably be time to move on!  This document is key – I can reuse portions of previous documents – especially for paratexts like the copyright page, titling, introduction and epilogues – but everything needs careful changes – from as small as a change of title, illustrator and ISBN on the copyright page, right up to re-written epilogues.

There’s also been a lot of other stuff going on, including my son’s second birthday and a three-day visit from my brother and his family.

– I was meant to begin drafting Harvest of Death but it hasn’t happened yet, due to the big editing jobs described above.  Don’t worry – when the time is right, it will simply fly off the keyboard!

In the next fortnight, I hope to…

– Complete the quest check

– Complete the codeword check

– Look at my fight mechanics

– List and standardise the rooms

– Check links to the other books

– Be getting my hands on the funds at last!

– Possibly write up Harvest of Death

– Follow up some more backers who dropped out

If you have any input about the codewords, quests, fights or other mechanics, please get in touch.  My game design has improved a lot since the first book, but it’s by no means perfect, and this is one area I really want to improve for Princes of the West.

Next update due: 29.8.25

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Steam Highwayman Coming to Mobile this Summer!

My latest update (number 37) is now live on Kickstarter.  It gives some tasty stats about how far along the fulfillment track I am (with some much-appreciated help…)

But then it veers off, like an over-powered iron-framed velosteam on a narrow country lane, into announcing this.

Steam Highwayman will be available as a mobile gamebook app this Summer 2021.