The Rulebook

The Elite Encounters Rulebook will be a single-edition book containing everything you will need to organise and play a roleplaying game in the setting of the Elite universe.

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Elite Encounters is a different beast compared to the other Elite writer's pack books, in that it does not contain any coherent story or plot, rather focusing more on the universe that the game and its tie-in media are part of, and providing the framework that other people can build there stories onto. As such it contains more background information and "scene-setting" than any other tie-in book (apart from Robert Holdstock's "Flight Training Manual" that was shipped as the original Elite game manual in 1984).

Elite Encounters will be available in a variety of formats, both electronic and hardcopy.

Contents

Although the final contents of the book have not yet been set in stone, the general content will be:

  • Character Generation Rules, including blank character sheets, ship stats and ship record sheets
  • Gameplay Rules, including a single page (pullout) rules summary
  • Miniatures Rules, including card model miniatures, measuring devices for movement and combat and card model 6-sided dice
  • Background information on the Elite Universe
  • Character and NPC Templates
  • 3 Sample Adventures, including pregenerated player characters, set in a region developed specifically for the RPG and featured in the computer game Elite: Dangerous!

If we can fit any more content into the book then we will!

Illustrations

The book will be richly illustrated using the work of a variety of people. Frontier Developments have made their catalogue of Elite: Dangerous concept art available and will allow the use of in-game footage from Alpha and Beta builds of the game prior to the full release.

Talented artist Arto Heikkinen will be providing illustrations for the book as well, hard on the heels of his critically acclaimed work on the "Tales From The Frontier" anthology, for which Arto created illustrations for each story. We're delighted to have Arto on board and look forward to his work being integrated with the RPG.

Developed in Collaboration with Frontier

The RPG will be developed in close association with Frontier Developments, allowing the author unprecedented access to the resources of the computer game that forms the foundation for this book. The universe of Elite is broad and detailed and Frontier themselves are creating huge amounts of background and history for their new game - Daftworks have exclusive early access to this information as well as having a small part in providing background material and being involved with creating a "writer's bible" for the authors releasing books with Elite: Dangerous.

This means that we are on the front line for any background information that is developed, and as much of that as possible will be included in the book.

Due to this collaboration we are hoping to add more rich content, including:

  • World Guide for selected gameplay area of space
  • Map of the Core systems for each organisation
  • Large-scale map of the galaxy