About Elite Encounters

Elite Encounters is a roleplaying game project. It is a joint project - the game will be developed by Dave "Selezen" Hughes under the Daftworks banner under license from Frontier Developments.

History of the Project

Elite: Dangerous is the fourth installment of the successful ELITE franchise, begun in 1984 by Ian Bell and David Braben. The game's development has been funded by a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign - a concept that allows anyone to fund a project using public financing through pledges and donations.

Part of that campaign was a pledge reward called the Writer's Pack. This allowed the pledger to purchase a license to write one book set in the Elite universe. The cost of the pledge was £4,500 - no problem for established authors or publishing companies but a little difficult to achieve for those aspiring to live their dream of contributing something to the Elite franchise.

Then someone hit on the idea of crowdfunding the money to be able to pledge on another crowdfunding campaign, and this concept became wildly successful. Towards the end of the Elite: Dangerous campaign, Dave suddenly realised that this Writer's Pack might be flexible enough to allow the creation of an RPG rulebook. After a few weeks of negotiations with Frontier Developments to arrange the specifics of the book's content and the boundaries of the concept and the Kickstarter campaign, the Elite Encounters Kickstarter was launched.

One month later, it succeeded - the Official Elite RPG was a reality!

About The Author

Dave Hughes, also known as Selezen on internet forums, is both an avid fan of roleplaying and a lifelong devotee to Elite.

He has lived and breathed Elite for nearly three decades, since a friend loaned him a tape with the word ELITE on the front. His love of the game branched out into fan fiction some years later when in typing class at school, he was tasked with practicing by typing something from his imagination. His first Elite story was the result of that. Table-top gaming came into his life at about the same time, when a trip to Edinburgh's new gaming store, Games Workshop, introduced him to Blood Bowl.

He became aware of roleplaying a few years later again, when he joined a local science fiction appreciation group. Some of the members asked him if he had ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons - he hadn't, but this was corrected within the week.

University beckoned, and it was here that Dave set up a roleplaying group that would eventually be host to his ideas for an Elite-based RPG. When he was handed chairmanship of the university's Wargaming Society he began developing a new game and using the members to test it out on. Feedback was positive and Dave and his group played Elite Adventures for over two years, even after the group left university.

During this time, the internet was invented. Dave began the first of many websites, and before long the site became host to his fan fiction. This grew into a site where the expanded universe of Elite became the focus, including technical overviews that grew out of the evolution of the roleplaying game.

Sadly, as time passed, the roleplayers moved on and Dave still dreamed of his RPG, tinkering with the documents now and again and always thinking about how to develop it further but always stopped by the thought that no-one would ever play it.

He focused more on his family and his work, becoming a programmer then a web developer then a programmer again, and all the time his constant companion was the Elite universe, first through the EBBS, then through the Oolite forums. A suggestion on the latter resulted in the creation of a unified timeline that attempted to tie the disparate universes of Elite and Frontier together. This timeline became a useful tool for people who wanted to write fan fiction.

Then, in 2012 three things happened at the same time. Frontier Developments announced the Kickstarter for Elite: Dangerous, Dave suddenly realised that the dream of an official Elite RPG was staring him in the face and a gentleman by the name of Allen Stroud put Dave's name forward for inclusion in a group working to create a writer's bible for the game, thanks in part to the timeline on his website.

Dave uses the name "Daftworks" for his website and as a trading name for various projects - the current focus being, of course, Elite Encounters. He also designs and produces card models, designs websites and talks about himself in the third person.

About Daftworks

Daftworks is a family business, created and owned by Dave and Anne Hughes. It is purely web-based and focuses on creative projects.

Some projects are:

• Battlebarge: a webcomic written and drawn by Dave
• Elite Historical Society: a site that looks into the history of the Elite universe. This site hosts the Elite Timeline, a series of short essays that integrate Elite and its mythology into the very different universe of the Frontier games.
• Daftworks Models: card modelling products, limited to only a few free models at the moment but with several models ready to roll out.
• Daftworks Games: simple card model games, including FREE games to download, print and play.
• Elite Encounters: the official Elite RPG (this site!)

More projects will follow.

Elite Encounters is the first large project to be undertaken, but Dave and Anne have access to a wide range of resources and experience in business and financial management as well as administrative experience. Dave has two decades worth of excperience in roleplaying, web design, multimedia and, of course, Elite to draw upon.