Ilkor: Welcome GameMaster Scott Huelsman
Welcome aboard Scott Huelsman: Ilkor's first Community GameMaster
We were approached by Scott just over a week ago, offering his services to get involved in the Ilkor project. Scott brings with him many talents such as vast knowledge and experience in role-playing, a gamemaster, webmaster and programmer. Scott has even developed his own 'Role-Playing Novel' which is a very interesting concept. You should really check out his work at: http://www.thehway.com/WizardReborn/RolePlayingNovel/PlaytheRPN/tabid/2924/Default.aspx.
So Scott is to be our first Community GameMaster. Early in the New Year he will aid myself (Sean) in populating the game with all the various metadata tokens such as; weapons, armour, shields, monsters, spells, settlements, magical items, etc. This is no small feat and will take many months to get the bulk done.
In the meantime Scott has wasted no time at all and has taken on board a very important job of constructing 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'. You can read more about this in the next section.
The Arcadia Gazetteer
The latest development from the Ilkor / HeroQuest project is the release of 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'.
For those of you, who might be a little unsure what a 'Gazetteer' is I've included a small extract from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer) below:
A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup of a country, region, or continent as well as the social statistics and physical features.
We have plans to release quite soon (sometime during the month of November) a wiki that will serve as a Gazetteer for 'The World of Arcadia' which is the setting for Ilkor: Dark Rising (http://ilkor.com).
To begin with it will be rather thin on content, but our first community GameMaster (Scott Huelsman) will be driving this over the coming months to bring it to life. This should prove to be an important area of the game for players to read, discover and learn about Arcadia.
So look out for this. It should be available within a couple of weeks with any luck. I'll keep you posted.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: Donations
We've just pushed a new update to our website (ilkor.com). The update includes quite a large number of content improvements. Go and hunt around the homepage / features section and see what you can discover. More will be coming online over the next couple of weeks aswell. 
What I really want to chat about is donations. Although we aren't going to be charging for playing the game, nor will we be surfing up adverts to ruin your gaming experience, we do need to find ways of re-coping our development and running costs (at the very least).
We have a few ideas up our sleeve on how we might be able to charge for some value added services and products, but that is some way down the line once the game goes live. Luckily we aren't doing this to get rich fast and we are developing it ourselves in our free time, thus keeping the current expenses down to a minimum. However there are ongoing and regular costs that need paying. The biggest is our monthly hosting cost of $70. We also have some ad hoc artwork costs from time to time.
I know times are getting tougher with the so called 'global recession' re-emerging but if anyone can and wants to support us by making a donation we would be over the moon. Any amount no matter how small will really help us in the long run. Donations can be made through PayPal who accept payment from all major credit cards. You can either click on the link below or go to ilkor.com and on the features section scroll down to the bottom left and click on the link which will present you with more information on making a donation.
Do the right thing and make a kind donation
We are looking at rewarding those that have faith in what we are doing in a number of ways. For starters we have created a new link in the footer on the homepage called Heroes. This link throws up a scroll popup that lists everyone that has and is aiding us in developing and running Ilkor. I know it isn't much, but it is a small 'thankyou' to show our appreciation.
Kind regards,
Sean.