Well, it's about that time of year again, I suppose. The time when a man (or woman, or turkey, or sentient hat) gets to thinking about heading to Indiana for some fun. Well, actually, that time is a couple weeks off as I write this, but that means that it is high time to think about travel plans to Chez Dan for RileyCon 14. It also, I am reminded, means that it is about two months past high time to start writing the module. But fear not!

It's been a bit of a dry spell in terms of RileyCon material, but here's something to tide you over for a little bit longer -- hopefully until RC14 in February 2010.

For the last half year, Ben and I have been working on an interactive fiction game that is roughly set in the RileyCon Universe. Sure, it's not 100% consistent with plot, characters, technology, background, or really anything from the past 13 RileyCons, but you should be used to that by now. Flexibility is a virtue.

Rover's Day out is a "text adventure", similar in some senses to the text-based computer games which were popular in the 1980s -- you know, like Zork. You control the main character, give commands, and the game responds. It's not quite the same as playing D&D with a DM, but on the otherhand, I can't scut you to fetch me a beer during the game. Hmm, perhaps that is a technological shortcoming.

The plot summary and characters from RCX have been uploaded to the website. You probably want to start on the page. I have some other website tweaks to make such as making the character sheets from each year available.

I noted a trend in web hits to the this site related to searches for Scarlet Lion... apparently, a UK author, Elizabeth Chadwick, recently published a book about a character called "the Scarlet Lion". She also wrote "Daughters of the Grail" -- certainly, in the spirit of RileyCon. The books are historical fiction and seem to have good reviews on amazon.co.uk and some other sites. They aren't on sale in the US, but I'll look for them in a couple months when we move to Belgium. The author has a homepage and blog. One other interesting tidbit -- she wrote the novelization of the First Knight script.

The Chronogismo can now be set to RC9.5.2, and I've started adding content from the most recent RileyCon. PCs and the Episode Summary are complete; soon, NPCs, Locations, etc., will be posted.

I'm also working on setting up file attachments so that the modules and character sheets will appear beneath each episode summary.

It occurred to me that I had better post the real time and place for RileyCon X, or someone will travel to the past and end up somewhere named Bloomington. So, for the record, RileyCon X will take place on Saturday, April 21, 2007 at Dan Biemer's Chateau d'Law in Ogden Dunes, Indiana. Hope to see y'all there.

Mark and I just got off the phone, and I've got the thumbs up to officially announce that RileyCon 9.5.2 will take place at the Chaos Lodge in Bloomington, Indiana on October 14, 2006 in the present timeline.

Jack and Mark will be your DMs, Tymme "Bannister" Laun will host and Marg has volunteered as Logistics Coordinator (see the Logistics Section of the website for useful stuff like eating, drinking and sleeping). Yay logistics coodinator! Take any discussion about planning to the Logistics Discussion Page.

The new RileyCon website, presumably the one that you are now staring at, is woefully incomplete, but the web-elves are working their bell-festooned pointy-toed boots off trying to bring it up before the next RileyCon. That's a bit more than a month away.

Why the new site? Well, it's been ten years since the first site went up, and I thought the RileyCon Universe had outgrown the limitations of the site. The new site takes all of the information from the old site, plus a ton of supplemental stuff that's been gathering magnetic dust on my hard drive for years, and puts it into a database driven website.