Risus: The Anything RPG
Legal Usage: Risus Fan-Material Policies
Risus is more than just a free, beer-and-pretzels joke RPG. It's a free, beer-and-pretzels joke RPG with a large and (I'm happy to say) fairly huggy family of online fans, including fans with an itch to write new Risus stuff. This is a good thing, and I do my best to keep the rules for fan-material as simple as Risus itself. At some point, I'll improve them with William Shatner references and Cajun Ninja. Until then, here goes ... Drop me a line if any of this stuff is unclear, or if you're just bored and want to drop me a line!

Rules for Free Fan-Supplements and Articles
(The Section You Probably Need)

Just about any normal kind of fan-work falls into this category: documents providing all-new stuff for Risus ... house rules, adventures, settings, character archives and so on. A Risus supplement assumes that the reader has access to a copy of Risus itself (because, of course, the reader does). It refers to Risus (and, possibly, to commercial Risus titles like the Companion), but it includes no text from any Cumberland title. Any Risus supplement must meet the following conditions:

  • All versions and iterations of the work must be absolutely free, distributed without any charge or financial obligation, regardless of form or format, electronic, physical or otherwise.
  • It must prominently mention Risus: The Anything RPG, and must (with similar prominence) include a hyperlink to the Risus homepage.
  • It must refer to me by name (S. John Ross) as the author of Risus.

Those are the bare-bones absolutes. There are, obviously, a lot of courtesy-type things that would be nice, but that aren't requirements. I'm still comfortable leaving those up to individual choice. Do what you can, please, to help keep things simple by voluntarily engaging in common-sense courtesy when possible. It would be a terrible irony if a six-page game required some kind of dense usage license.

The Use of the IOR Crest

Any IOR member may display the IOR crest as part of any Risus work, without special notice or other conditions. See the IOR Charter. Non-IOR members may not make use of the crest in any way.

The Use of Risus Artwork (Stick Figures, Etc.)

Feel free to re-publish any Risus-specific illustrations which I've made available in freeware form (including the illustrations in Risus itself, and any "LCB" artwork I've released in TrueType font form). Please remember to credit me for them, however (this is a separate concern from crediting me as the author of Risus), and include both explicit copyright notice (appropriate to the year of their publication; see the source font or document for the year(s) to use) and explicit notice that the art is used by permission. Copyright should always be for "S. John Ross," rather than "Cumberland Games & Diversions," since Cumberland is a DBA, not a corporation.

Recast Risus (The More Complicated One)

I make allowances for a special kind of Risus fan-document I call a "recast." This is the original Risus: The Anything RPG (or any recognizeable chunks of it) re-written to suit a particular setting or genre. Recasts follow all the standard rules for fan supplements (see above), with some extras:

  • Since any recast is a repost of my original work with your original genre and/or setting additions, we share authorship, and this should be noted explicitly in the credits and/or byline.
  • You must explicitly note that the portions of the game taken from the original Risus are my copyrighted material.
  • Only Risus itself may be recast, not the Companion, Ring of Thieves or other titles. If you quote any text from the original Risus game, the rules for "Recast Risus" apply.
  • Note that, to qualify as a "recast," your work must emphasize specific setting and/or specific genre material. If your contributions are entirely game-mechanical (variant or expanded rules), you must present them as a supplement (see above) using only your own words.

In general, I think supplements are the best way to go, but I understand that a lot of people enjoy putting together something self-contained, so that's cool.

Risus Mirrors

If you like Risus, please link to it rather than mirroring it. Links strengthen the site's position in search engines so that new gamers who stumble on it are (A) stumbling onto the most current version and (B) stumbling onto the hub of the thing, where they can find the accompanying freebies, related commercial stuff and the bigass collection of links to fan-sites and translations.

You may, if you wish, host a copy of the complete ZIP archive containing the PDF and other versions, but please do your best to keep it current, do not modify it (or its contents) in any way, provide a link back to the Risus homepage, and let me know you've posted it so I can include you on the downloads page.

Remember ...

Individual documents have a way of traveling individually from their source, so please remember to apply these rules to every article/page on your site, if you the muse tickles you to engage in frequent Risussery! This is quadruply important for Word documents, PDF files, and other files that folks are more likely to download than just read in a browser.

If You Happen to Notice ...

If you spot a Risus fan-page online that doesn't conform to these rules ... remember that 90% of the time (give or take a percent) it's just an honest oversight. The spirit of these rules is far more important than the letter. It's not that big a deal, so if you decide to email them (or me) about it, keep it gentle and assume the best.

The Last Rule for Fan-Freebies

The only other "rule" is - write me and let me know you've done it, whatever "it" may be! That way I can link to you, both from the Risus site and (if applicable) from the Risus directory in the Open Directory Project.

Licensing Risus For Commercial Projects
(When the Hobby Becomes Work!)

Risus licenses (to produce adventures, spinoff games, swag ... anything someone would have to pay for) are available to commercial publishers. I've done a few such licenses over the years ... and I've turned down requests for several others. I'm picky. I want Risus gamers to be comfortable assuming that a Risus logo on a commercial item amounts to an endorsement of reasonable quality, not just something someone paid for.

Risus licenses aren't free and aren't "open," but they're inexpensive and generous in many ways, and they are negotiable (never boilerplate). If you're seriously thinking of publishing some commercial Risus PDFs or POCD paperbacks or even something through the rusty old three-teir distribution network, drop me a line and remind me of the times your work rocked my gaming table. We'll take it from there.

[Image of the PDF version pages]

Last Updated 1/24/07, but current today!

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