A +100 page eBook to share an Elite: Dangerous adventure
The official Distant Legacy 3308 Expedition has ended, and so has my eBook, which started as a collection of postcards and ended with a +100 page document that tells the whole voyage.
Although the journey to Toby’s Rest is still ongoing, the eBook of the official “21 Waypoints” is now finished and ready to share with the participants and all those who may want to look at some of the amazing places visited during the expedition. From September 2022 until June 2023, the Distant Legacy 3308 Expedition crossed the Elite: Dangerous universe, from the Bubble all the way to Isham’s Reach.
A voyage that started with most participants traveling with the Fleet Carrier Toby’s Rest was drastically changed when Frontier decided to separate platforms, forcing PC players to embark on the FC Atreides Dawn, while console players kept on Toby’s Rest. I’ve shared those stories in my Outpost 2 blog, so no need to go into detail about them now; here, it is time to look at the eBook, which uses images from Elite: Dangerous Odyssey to show, through my experience of the journey, some of the fantastic vistas you’ll find inside the game.
It all started with some images. I hate to see images being lost in HDDs, and I believe collages are a great way to tell narratives, so I did what I’ve done in RL: create series of images that “freeze” a moment in time. I’ve done this type of collections in RL photography, building diaries based on photographs, so why not do it here? I’ve done it too in other games but Elite and an expedition are the ideal background for building a collage that is a diary.
Postcards: a diary of a journey
Each postcard shares a series of images that give an idea of the location visited. That’s what postcards are used for. Once I had defined the layout, all I needed was to create images that would fit those spaces. Keeping consistency from postcard to postcard made sense and I was happy with the idea. But because the expedition had its own story to share I imagined I could create more than postcards, and imagined one eBook with them all. Great…
Then I imagined a section for big landscape images showing an important element of each waypoint… and that was 42 pages, plus opening spread for the section. And a space to share the story of Toby, the cat behind the expedition… and one more for Commanders participating… and another for the Fleet Carriers taking part in the expedition… and the eBook kept growing. It’s more than 100 pages that I closed today, just before writing this note.
Some may consider that this is my eBook of the expedition, but I believe it is more than that. The images I share will be similar to those many other Cmdrs. took while visiting the same planets, stars, nebulas, so what you see here is really a diary of a journey that, I believe, has left many of us in awe, and wanting more.
Dangerous Journey, a first comic eBook
This is not a perfect graphical work, and you may find some typos were and there, for which I hope you forgive me. I wanted to have this ready before people go in other directions and forget the whole story. I know I will not forget it, because this was a voyage that left marks on me, one of them being that my cat and “copawlot” Yellow died during this journey, a journey that was created because of a cat, Toby, who died in 2018.
On the other hand, this voyage, which was a great experience altogether, triggered a passion from my youth: creating comics! Not drawing them, this time, but using Elite: Dangerous assets to tell stories. Although this eBook is a diary, while I was working on it, I started a comic eBook telling a story that mixes game world and Real Life: how one of my Cmdrs. travelled from a Guardian site to a planet near Sag A* with Guardian Keys for a memorial for my cat Yellow. The comic eBook Dangerous Journey, my first comic eBook using EDO assets, tells that story.
A passion for comics to tell stories
I’ve become so invested in the idea that I created a space online to share the eBook, Yellow Cat Comics, which is another way to keep the memory of Yellow alive. Using comic-style eBooks to tell stories in Elite: Dangerous Odyssey is a project that I want to keep working on. I’ve already published one other title, The MIGHTY Sidewinder, and I am now working on a project around the Six Nebula Tour, organized by Cmdr. Fuinnel with support from The Stellar Cartographers Guild. It’s coming along nicely… although I tend to spend less time in game, exploring, and more drawing pages…
Using comic-style eBooks to share experiences in Elite, even knowledge, is, from my perspective, quite an interesting option that not only provides another type of medium support around the game, but allows those who play to share their own experiences and build narratives in a medium as rich as comics. It may not have the audiences of YouTube or Twitch streams, but it’s a creative challenge that makes you look at the game differently. I know I do!
Follow the link to download the ebook:
Distant Legacy 3308 expedition — Toby’s Rest Voyage in Elite: Dangerous
