We Have a Book! So What?

Today was a pretty exciting day for the two founders brothers co-conspirators minds behind Fleet Command Hevelius: We are officially LIVE on Wargame Vault! This journey has been almost a decade in the making. We started the groundwork of our Orion Incident universe in 2016, sketching out the overarching identities for the Empire of the Sevens and their eternal rivals in the Solar Alliance, and by 2017 had our first rules draft 40% of the way to being kind of complete.

The first Orion Incident ruleset explored futuristic ground combat pitting a handful of elite units against an army of defenders. We wanted an asymmetric game that really gave you the feel of being an action hero on offense, and General Zhukov (the Death of Stalin version) on defense - a quality vs. quantity match each time you set up.

Here’s a nostalgia shot of us giving a demo at Recruits KC:

A demo game at Recruits KC back in 2017, participant face expertly anonymized with the latest identity preservation technologies

Deciding the magic wasn’t quite there, we shifted our vision to airplanes. We don’t have pictures of that one, mostly for IP-related reasons owing to the assets we had on hand to tinker with, but it was a great opportunity to enrich the setting while exploring how to make a machine feel like a main character. It also gave us Valkonia, which if you’ve had a chance to read our core rulebook you’ll recognize as a flashpoint in the Expansion Zone setting.

That lasted us up to the 2020 time frame, when we wrote Expedition Hevelia (not available anywhere).

The best way to describe Expedition Hevelia would be as a total conversion mod for the first RPG we ever played (not D&D - that came a few years later). It took about six months to rewrite it to fit our setting and tweak a few rules, and another eight months after that “fixing” all the rules we felt were broken.

Expedition Hevelia gave us the Hevelien Expansion Zone, the first region of space we zoomed in on for our “Cold War Turning Hot” setting. It had everything we needed to let an intrepid adventurer play in the gray zone between empires, where the only law was the law you brought with you. It also had spaceship rules.

I can’t describe the “there’s a there there” feeling with Expedition Hevelia’s starship combat rules. They were very RPG heavy - the starship combat section was about 13 densly-packed, all-text pages, with another 30 dedicated to defining equipment and module variations. Something about them made the two of us think, “You know what? We could simplify this and turn it into a game we’d actually play regularly.” And we did.

(Fleet Command Hevelius, by comparison, is 8 pages of rules with about half of it being graphics and supplementary material; and 4 pages of equipment.)

So What?

Everything you’ve read about putting a game on a shelf is true: It’s expensive (though writing Expedition Hevelia was free - the barrier to entry was a word editor and a book we thought we could do a better job of writing). It can take a long time (though a ten year incubation is optional). Having a game available does not guarantee anyone will actually buy it (though building a community is a reward in its own right).

We hope you’ll check out our book. We also hope you’ll check back here from time to time. Fleet Command Hevelius has a rich history and a number of mechanics that we’re proud of, and our “So What?” series will deconstruct how we arrived at some of those design decisions.