Riley Con I:  The Muppets versus Pooh

Winnie the Punk and his gang encounter the Muppets Templar on the plain of Shambala where The Grail has rested for half a millenium.  The Pooh Gang seeks to deliver the Holy Grail to their Master, the necromancer Christopher Robin, who will use it's power for evil.  The Muppets Templar, blamed by the Templars since the Crusades for the loss of the Grail, seek to clear their name with the Templar Order and prevent the Grail falling into the wrong hands.  Through the power of Christopher Robin and Jim Henson, the two teams travel to the plane of Shambala where they solve the riddles of the Shambala Masters. The helpless Porkboy is captured by the Muppets and becomes a prisoner of war.  The two teams clash in the inner Grail chambers and Winnie the Punk's gang is routed.  Porkboy is left behind with the fluffy remains of his company.  The Muppets return to the Prime Material Plane with the Grail.

Riley Con II:  The Claw of Templaro

Christopher Robin, a servant of Cthulhu, opens a gate to the Plane of Shambala, recovers Porkboy and reanimates Pooh.  Under orders from his dark god, Christopher Robin agrees to work with the United Nations to recover the Grail.  It is revealed that Porkboy has also been working for the UN Covert Emergency Response Agency, UNCOVER,and that his earlier capture by the Muppets was part of an infiltration plan.  Robin and the remaining two members of the Pooh Gang assemble a new team to recover the Grail.

Meanwhile, as the Muppets conclude their Quest and transfer possession of the Grail back to the Templars, they are attacked by a Martian strike force in the Temple of Solomon beneath the Old City of Jerusalem. The Martians capture the Muppets and the Grail. Cookie Monster escapes with the aid of High Priest of the Templars. He becomes the nucleus for a second UNCOVER team bent on retrieving the Grail.

The two teams explore the pyramids of Egypt and the city of Jerusalem.  They learn that the Grail is actually a (alien?) device of great antiquity and unusual powers. They also learn of a research program by the US government to recover alien technology. The two groups explore Warehouse 23 and Site 51, and learn of a functional alien spacecraft still on Earth.  Together, the two groups have sufficient information to activate and pilot the ship to Mars where they may recover the Grail.

In an unfortunate failure to communicate, however, the two groups nearly annihilate each other, and riddle the flying saucer with bullet holes. Even direct intervention by Cthulhu cannot reverse the tide of events. The Martians let loose the Grail's Bovinator ray on an unwary Earth, turning all humans to cow-like Bovinoids.

Riley Con III:  Katallakh Rising

The Earth Bovinated, Grail in the hands of the Martians, the Muppets missing in action, the majority of UNCOVER agents dead in Warehouse 23, and the only remaining interstellar ship on Earth full of bullet holes, Riley Con III begins to address the bigger picture.  The Bootians strike into Lysithian space, stealing Holy Relics from the Priests of Katallakh , the Lysithians capture the Knarvon Star System.  A team of cryogenically preserved troubleshooters from the Alpha Complex repair the Martian saucer in Warehouse 23.  Porkboy and 49K8R teleport to Mars and liberate the Muppets.  Together, they recover the Grail, defeat the Martian Hive at Cydonia, and steal a Lysithian battle cruiser.  The remainder of the characters lift off from Earth in the repaired Martian saucer, heading for the UNCOVER moonbase.

Riley Con 3.5:  Riley Con 1999

In the exciting conclusion of Riley Con III, the Muppets join up with Tularemian rebels. They teleport to the South American Fascist Enclave on the Moon, fight space Nazis and tunnel into the moon. Winnie the Punk and his strange companions travel to the UNCOVER moonbase and also start tunneling towards Katallakh's Temple at the center of the moon. The two groups meet and the Muppets give the Grail to Winnie the Punk. The Grail is destroyed, and with it the universe. When it vanishes, the Muppets, Winnie the Punk and Porkboy invert alignments. Winnie the Punk becomes Winifred the Pure, the Bearer of the Grail. The Borrelian Time-Space device known as the "Observer" reveals its presence and offers an opportunity to alter history. Two messages are sent into the past, one message to the Plane of Shambala in 1996, the other to the planet Zebulon, nearly 7000 years before.

Riley Con IV:  Winifred the Pure and the Pyramids of Zebulon

Seven thousand years ago, a small band of priests from the Reformed Volderic Church of Zebulon oppose the Scarlet Lion, a mysterious invader who had conquered their land. Their mission: to identify the heir to the throne, provide him with the Bejewled Cat of Zebulon, and assist him in overthrowing the Scarlet Lion. At the Pyramids of Zebulon, they are joined by the remaining members of Raven’s Elite Force, fighters from the heyday of Orlane.  The two groups find the Cat, proclaim that Elf-fezzed Zaron the Priestly is the Prince, and the Scarlet Lion’s evil sorcerer, Mylo, is exiled to another universe.  The royal line of Zebulon is re-established and Zaron drives the Scarlet Lion back to her fortress at Wyrmcrest.

On Earth, about AD 1100, Mirlyne and King Arthur send the newly manufactured Winnie the Pure and his Knights of Purity on a quest to recover a Grail from a crashed spaceship in the Middle East. The group divides into two halves; one explores the tourist trap around the crash site, the other meets Mad King Rolf. They find that Rolf already has the Grail and that he is allied with Szorbs , alien servants of the Lysithian Republic. After fighting Rolf and the Szorbs, the Shambala Masters reveal themselves. When they open portal to Shambala and transfer the Grail, thus ending the Grail paradox. A temporal assassin sent by the Observer notices the connection to Shambala and clips it, thus isolating Shambala as a pocket universe. With only one grail in our universe (the one in the Tomb of Katallakh on the Moon), the Universe reboots…

Riley Con V:  Winnie the Punk and the Frozen Head of Walt Disney

A full-universe reboot comes at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon of a three day weekend, and catches the Continuity Elves by surprise.  With only a few minutes remaining in the workday, they hastily scrape together spaghetti code.  A number of details fall through the cracks.  Winnie the Punk and Winifred the Pure inhabit the same body.  Several characters end up in his stomach, roam his body, and realign his brain.  After recovering their bodies from Mirlyne’s pickup truck, they fly to OrioDisney to film new movies.  They learn that the Lysithians are planning to teleport the Magic Kingdom to their home world for their Prince’s birthday party.

To ride along, Winnie and his comrades need to jack into the Epcot device.  To gain entry, they steal the sword of Long John and a pair of Leiderhausen.  After exploring pirate’s cove, torching a Wendy’s franchise and ordering zombie pirates to terrorize tourists, the nominally "good" team obtains the sword.  Everyone teleports into the Prince Gragnarok's castle on Lysithia, and explores his pantry.  No sooner do they find the Pimp Ring of Disrespect, than the Prince himself arrives home.  The regent, Severus, watches patiently as our heroes jump the little boy and deal him hundreds of points of damage.  Severus, a smugly self-confident adult Red Dragon watches in disbelief as he too is dispatched and Winnie the Punk lowers the anti-technology shield around the Lysithian system.   Lysithia falls to Bootian warships.  Using the Pimp Ring, Winnie the Punk exiles his Winifred alter-ego to another universe.

Riley Con VI:  Franchise Wars

The mysterious Dr. Malfeaso lures Colonel Sanders and Popeye into his laboratory, offering transportation to the Cloud Islands of Kessel. Each hopes to be the first to locate the fabled 12th Spice, an ingredient which would assure corporate domination of the Chicken FastFood Industry. After arrival, they explore the Spice Islands in blimps which remain from an earlier expedition. Each Island has a unique culture which is soon destroyed by our Chicken Entrepreneurs. Eventually, they find that the 12th Spice is not a thing, but a person. "Brainy Spice", as she is known here, is a Time Cop marooned on the Center Island. Her equipment was jettisoned into the time stream, and some of it was recovered on Zebulon , some was salvaged from orbit by the Wendy's/Disney Corporation.

Harland Sanders and Popeye the Sailor double-team the WenDis Space Station, toppling the frozen heads of Walt Disney and Dave Thomas. Meanwhile, the group on Zebulon meets Elvis and travels to Wyrmcrest. This cursed burial mound was the place of the final battle between the forces of Zaron the Priestly and the Scarlet Lion. She and the remnants of her dread army were defeated and then walled up here. With great foreboding, the team enters the site and discovers that it has recently been visited. A temporal portal still functions to Earth. Both teams plunge through the portal. They emerge in a warehouse to find Malfeaso tied and gagged. A tall man in a deerstalker cap and trenchcoat exclaims from a stairwell, "Good God, Watson, they've captured Moriarity".

Meanwhile, in interstellar space in the year 2002, factions vie for power in the wake of the collapse of the Lysithian government. Trade alliances balance the remnants of the loyal Lysithian forces, and all quake under the iron grip of the Bootians. The rules for Scuttlebutt are summarized in MS-Word Adobe Acrobat formats.

Riley Con VII: Elementary, Old Bear

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In London, Cthulhu’s ancient evil descended like the unexpected darkness of a mid-day eclipse. In Paris, a bloodthirsty maniacal chimpanzee rampaged out of control. This was the world our adventurers encountered when the followed Dr. Malfeaso through the Scarlet Lion's time-space portal on Zebulon to the London of 1890. Malfeaso was immediately captured by Sherlock Holmes, and placed in the custody of a Time Cop from Scotland Yard. In exploring Malfeaso’s Offices in London, Winnie the Punk and his gang uncovered a plot to blow up the greatest minds of the century -- the MORLOCs (Masters of Oratory, Rhetoric, Logic, Occultism and Culture). Having averted disaster, the two groups decided to divide and conquer, with the Pooh Gang diverting to Paris to deal with the Scarlet Lion, while the MORLOCs pursued her erstwhile ally, Cthulhu in London. Adventures in the Royal Library, Covent Gardens and Whitechapel eventually led the MORLOC investigators up the coast to Ramsgate, an ancient focus of impurity. Here they encountered the scions of Cthulhu working to bring the dreaded Elder God to our world. Even more alarmingly, they became privy to the unthinkable intention of the Scarlet Lion to spawn with Cthulhu itself upon Earth’s Moon. Entering the world of half-thought dreams and phantasmic logic, the MORLOCs battled in the ether with the servants of Cthulhu. After being all but defeated by his dread horde, they finally succeeded, but at great cost to their sanity.

Meanwhile, on Earth, the Punk Gang’s submersible was split by a temporal torpedo, with half the group arriving 3 months earlier, and half 3 months later than their departure time from London. Because of temporal shrapnel, individuals were constantly exchanging between these two time points throughout the rest of the adventure -- a source of considerable confusion for all. Those who went to the future were confronted with a bleak landscape: the MORLOCs had been defeated and the Scarlet Lion ruled from Galway to China. The group who traveled to the past encountered a group of French Mimes, struggling against both the Scarlet Lion and the mad vendetta of the evil Chimpanzee scientist, Cornelius. After much investigation, both groups learned that the Scarlet Lion had transmitted a message to her allies using the Eiffel Tower as an antenna. Using information gleaned from both the future and the past, the two groups managed to coordinate an attack at the exact instant of the broadcast. Working with the insane Ape, they detonated explosives under the hydraulic struts supporting the Eiffel Tower, misdirecting the antenna. At the same instant, a band of Zombie Knights attacked the Scarlet Lion’s forces while the Scarlet Lion herself projected a force field around the tower.

The Scarlet Lion was surprised when her magic teleported Winifred the Pure to the top of the Eiffel Tower rather than her Prime Minister of Evil, Mylo. This was the result of earlier tampering with the components of her spell (but not her spellbook!). Winifred and Winnie the Punk were able to unite the Pimp Ring of Dis and the Ring of Respect through the force field, dispelling it. In a cinematic climax, director Woody Allen decided to cut the scene at that point, fading to the Epilogue in which the characters are vaguely aware of a radio broadcast about Martians landing in New Jersey.

Halfway across the galaxy, intergalactic trade and exploration continue in Scuttlebutt II: Die Siedleren von Katallach

Riley Con VIII: The Owl and the Pussycat

In the last decade of the 19th Century, the Leonine Hegemony expanded rapidly. It arose overnight in Switzerland and crushed Europe, Asia and the Middle East in its path until General Cornelius, an intelligent but sadistic simian from an alternate world, held it at bay. His ingenious plan to topple the Eiffel tower thwarted the Scarlet Lion’s plans to contact her home world for reinforcements. In the battle that followed, her magic went awry, snaring both Winifred the Pure and Mylo from a neighboring universe and inserting them into Winifred the Pure’s body. A temporal explosion ensued, hurling the Scarlet Lion and many others through time.

Now, it is October, 1938. The Leonine Hegemony has abandoned its isolationist ways and is poised for a second attempt to expand its borders. Some say the renewed lust for conquest may presage the return of the Scarlet Lion from her temporal journey. In a contest of wills, Mylo has suppressed Winifred the Pure. Mylo (now known as the Fuhrer) has taken command of the Leonine Hegemony and built it into a colossal war machine. No one anticipated the scale or speed of Mylo’s headlong grab for territory. Nor did anyone conceive that he would employ rockets, armored zeppelins and, it is rumored, undead troops in his all-out thrust for world domination.

In America, a secret session of the League of Nations drafts a resolution to create an emergency response team, LONER and empowers it to restore peace in the world. An artifact from Zebulon is sent to Earth, but is nearly lost when the flying saucer is shot down by rocket-zeppelins from the Hegemony. Zebuloid couriers manage to cache the artifact in an abandoned Martian training complex deep under a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Two LONER teams explore the complex, recover the Bejeweled Cat of Zebulon and collar an unknown man they discover in the complex.

By early 1939, the Cat has arrived in Casablanca, Morocco, where it is used as a magical direction-finder to locate the Ebony Owl of Evil, a device which would give Mylo almost unlimited power over the Undead. The Zombie Knights of Camelot and a Film Crew unite to destroy the Ebony Owl of Evil. In a catastrophic finale, Winifred the Pure dominates Mylo just long enough that their shared body is incinerated.

RileyCon IX: A Return to Babylon

At the end of the Second Leonine War, the United Nations was formed under the leadership of Secretary General Porkins. Within it, he created a special operations team: UNCOVER. Their first mission: apprehend two escaped convicts thought to have participated during the war in enemy research programs. One was recovered from the PDR Nippon, Simon. Simon was a Bolivian Hairdresser who traveled back in time to assassinate United America President Sanders. The other was apprehended in the Leonine Republic, and was identified as Malfeaso, a Continuity Elf who had become temporally entangled with the Scarlet Lion. During the operation, they learned of the research of Wolfgang Parsalis, who posited that spacefaring Neanderthals long ago settled in Antarctica and worshipped Katallakh. His theories were proven correct when a team was sent to the moon. There, they discovered a Leonine moonbase that had revolted against the Hegemony. Together with the moonbase crew, they located the Spawn of the Scarlet Lion and Cthulhu. When the Egg was brought to the lunar surface, the Bootians arrived out of the blue and demanded that it be handed over. Winnie the Punk obliged. Minutes later, he was picked up by a Pink Cadillac and whisked away to an unknown destination. The remaining explorers returned to their ships and bases to begin repairs.

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RileyCon X: The Cat Is In The Bag

Chaos Lodge, Indiana. 2006.