If you enjoy Risus, you're not alone (and you're about to become even less so). Risus includes one of the best features any roleplaying game can have: an active global community. The following are some of its grooviest expressions; join in!

• The Official Mailing List: The official Risus Mailing List is a 24/7 source of news from the world of Risus! Subscribers are the first to know about new Risus material from Cumberland Games, as well as new fan-sites spotted on the web, an archive of yet more freebies (some exclusive to the list), and other warm-and-perky goodness.
• RisusTalk Mailing List: The best place you'll find for free-for-all discussion, banter, and social rules-tinkering is RisusTalk, a cozy Risus email forum hosted by Guy Hoyle. Sign up and meet some new friends; it's rowdy, chatty, and fun.
• Risusiverse: There are a lot of Risus fan-pages across the Web, but what if you have cool Risus stuff to share, but no homepage of your own? Risusiverse is a wiki-style Risus resource founded by Larry Bullock and maintained by Dan Suptic. It's all the Risus you want and all the Risus you want to add!
• The Risus RPG Fan-Forum: If you fancy a forum to foment your fandom, the Risus RPG Fan-Forum, hosted by Brent Wolke, is what you need. This one's still in its growth stages, which means it's time for you to show up and make some Risusy noise!
• Dancing Amid the Memes and Cat-GIFs: If social networks are your time-sink of choice, there are pages dedicated to Risus on both Facebook and Google+, so purple stick-figures can stalk you wherever you hang out online.

Essentials & Oddities

• The Solo Adventure: It's a frosty night in an unfamiliar city, and you're a 3-foot tall burglar with hair on your feet. Your lovely partner is missing, and the only clues you'll wake up with are a terrible headache, a slip of paper, and a magic ring. Ring of Thieves is a big (20,000 word) fantasy gamebook for Risus! Too cool for school.
• The Other Solo Adventure: Veteran game designer Peter Schweighofer turned his keyboard to Risus solitaire writing, too, with a spooky little supernatural tale, Trapped in the Museum.
• The "Lost" Worldbook: I never did get around to finishing my Geezer campaign writeup, but the mostly-done micro-worldbook is a relic from my archives that you might enjoy. Oil the wheels on your walker, freshen the battery in your hearing aid, and kick some ass, Tyburn Tree Style.
• The Bizarre Webcomics: My initial reaction to Matthew Ritter's Risus comic, "Death to Robots" was "Holy Crap!" and I suspect you'll feel the same way. It's an adaptation, of sorts, of a scene hinted at in the Risus Companion, taken to new levels of stick-figure madness by its evil creator ... and since then, he's done sequels! These are archived in the Oddities folder of the Mailing List, along with several other stick-figure creations.
• The Swag Shop: We all have ... special urges. For some of us, it's the urge to drink coffee from a copy of Risus. If this sounds familiar, get thee immediately to the Risus swag-shop at CaféPress, to see what's available at the moment.
• The Dice: You can even download the "Official Dice of Risus" - Sparks Dice! They're funny and cute, with a bonus dose of impracticality! (Acrobat format, ZIPped).
• The Dingbat Font: If you enjoyed the "art" in the Risus PDF, you can play with it at home thanks to the Risus Dingbat Font (Windows TrueType). Decorate greeting cards, game handouts, pets, etc.
• The Miniatures: There are no official Risus miniatures, but the Sparks Scrapbook comes pretty close, since (like Risus) it's fun, free, and doesn't take itself at all seriously! Note the familiar stick-figure artwork on some of the minis . . .
• The Paperwork: Risus Character Sheets come in two sizes: "portrait" and "wallet sized." Snag them both by clicking here (Acrobat format, ZIPped).
• The Table: The Risus Probability Table isn't funny or cute. But if you're curious what the odds are of a Grim Vigilante(4) beating a Difficulty 15 target number, this file's for you (Acrobat format, ZIPped).
• The GM Screen: Or more accurately, the GM Screen insert, a single sheet containing all of the many complicated charts, tables, matrices, formulae, and minutiae that makes Risus tick. Since that still left more than half a page empty, I threw in the Probability Table and a big logo. Snag it! (Acrobat format, ZIPped).
• Reviews: Lots of gamers have reviewed Risus online (and most have been very merciful!). Those I know of include the reviews by gamerchick, Hollis McCray, Larry Bullock, Patrick Clark, and Tanner. There are also reviews of A Kringle in Time by Demian Katz and Andreas Melhorn. That last one's in German, but I'm assured via awkward Google translation that it's positive ... Risus was also awardified at RPGnet.
• The Character Generation Software: I don't know code from a banana peel, but Hollis McCray and Larry Bullock do! Both gents have created cool tools; give 'em a look!
• FAQs, Permissions and Licenses: The general-purpose Blue Room FAQ has a Risus section for general fan-queries, but the Fan-Usage Page is devoted, in particular, to the legal jiggery-pokery necessary for those putting up their own Risus material on the web.
• Submissions Guide: Think you're ready to contribute to the core Risus library? Download these guidelines to pitching me a proposal, and maybe I'll pitch a contract right back.
• Related Reading: If you enjoy Uresia, you may also enjoy the Risus version, titled (perhaps inevitably) Uresius: Grave of Anything. If you're curious about the Companion (see below), there's an exclusive excerpt at Uncle Bear. Also worth looking at is the Big List of RPG plots, an article that was bundled into the earliest commercial hardcopy edition of Risus - a $1 booklet sold at MarsCon in Virginia, lo these may years ago. When combined with the Big List, Risus becomes a complete gaming library! Sort of!

Join the Club / Buy the Companion! If you enjoy Risus and Ring of Thieves and the other freebies, join the Risus march toward world domination by purchasing the Risus Companion: a 64-page smorgasbord of Risus madness! - and in so doing, join the International Order of Risus, the official fan club. The sheer coolness of it all is almost medically dangerous.

Embark on an Epic Campaign! There was a winter, not too long ago, when the fabric of the world came undone, and it fell upon an unlikely band of friends to set things right. According to legend, their travels took them into hidden places in a modern metropolis, into the ancient streets of Bethlehem, into the foggy dark of old London and Wales, and to an evil citadel beyond civilization. But the legends are a little vague, and seem to have a lot of naughtiness in them. Are the legends true? Find out with your own group with a satisfying and shameless epic. This is a holiday mega-module that will touch you ... in those places where it's wrong to touch.

• Stacy Allston, Risus fan extraordinaire (and fellow Austinite) expands the superhero concepts presented in Option IV into a full-fledged genre supplement: Risus Supers! Check out that fun munged-photo artwork, too!
• Tim Ballew goes a'gaming in "the last days of the Weird West" with his Silverlode 1908 campaign - and as a Risus Monkey, he hosts yet more Risus material, including Dan Suptic's excellent Risus Mariachi, which puts me in the mood for gaming and tomatillo sauce. And that's a full evening, my friend. Peek at the Monkey for even more!
• Peter Barnard did a really spiffy little treatment of giant robots and the long-haired pretty boys (and others) that sit inside them with Mobile Armour Fighting Team Risus, his Risus Mecha supplement.
• Rob Barrett does his Risus campaigning in Middle-Earth with "Small Hands."
• Shane Biernes brings Risus and computer games into a happy stew with his Final Fantasy VII adaptation. Complete with some mildly crunchy rules additions.
• John G. Bell has kicked off his Risus page with a new look at doing Firefly (and Serenity) with Risus, building on the work of Big Damn Hero, Martin Runyon.
• Brandon Blackmoor uses Risus as the mechanics in his very interesting Rough Magic game, a "role-playing game of magic, mystery, and guns in 1960's Europe." Too cool.
• Dale C. Blessing takes to the skies with Hurrah, a Risus mini-sourcebook for World War I aerial conflict, complete with a cool list of aircraft, combat examples, and other fine stuff. Climb into your Sopwith Camel, shake your fist at the cat next door, and take off!
• W. Doug Bolden takes his own stab at merging trad-fantasy grooviness and Risus laid-backness (with all kinds of system-tweaks) in The Heroes of Oblend!
• Aaron Breland presents a really interesting hard-SF space setting for Risus with his Worlds at War material. Ice-cold marvy, and I mean that.
• Mark R. Brown let Risus inspire him to build a fantasy solitaire game called Risus Royale. Save the Kingdom of Kardz!
• Larry Bullock has a nifty Risus page with his review of the game, a magic system, rules commentary, and some character-making fun with Java, including a cool downloadable thingy and an equally cool thingy you can use online. There are a lot more thingies than that there, too. Thingies aplenty, all cool! Larry's also the founder of Risusiverse (see Dan Suptic), so eternal huggage to him!
• Patrick Clark wrote a very friendly review of Risus for RPGnet. And apparently he really did like it, because more recently he wrote Belgarion's World for Risus, a very well thought-out netbook for adventuring in the world of David Eddings' Belgariad, Malloreon, and later books.
• Kenneth Coble tells of a world where ancient icky things from beyond the stars mix with postapocalyptic troubles. Sleepwalkers includes a nice page of characters and some new rules material to go along with the creepy setting. He's also got the beginnings of a Schismatrix adaptation.
• Michael Collett runs an arabian-nights style Risus PBEM called Lands of Fate. Looks cool!
• Dylan Craig takes Risus into the 17th century with Ironsides, including his very keen Faith, Sorcery and Witchcraft material. Definitely worth a look for any Risus GM looking to flesh out a Risus fantasy campaign. Dylan is also the creator of the groovy The Innocent Must Die rules!
• Scott Dunlop likes his future mixed with his fantasy, as he demonstrates in his extra-groovy 9th World, an original RPG setting for Risus!
• Florian Edlbauer brings us crawling horrors and doomed antiquarians with his Call of Cthulhu adaption, Risus R'lyeh, one of many items on his Risus page.
• Facebook isn't a Risus fan, but there are Risus fans on Facebook, and that's cool.
• Phillip Foster has a tasty appetizer-tray of house rules at his Risus page, including rules for those dice-inside-other-dice that have been gathering dust on my shelf, "Risus Uno" that takes Funky Dice in a whole new direction, genre "stylesheets" and more.
• Timothy Groves has an RPG page on his fanfic site, and there you'll find some nicely assembled PDFs adapting Star Wars and some World of Darkness material to Risus! Rockin' cool ... But does this mean we'll someday have Risus fanfic?
• James Hargrove falls alphabetically between a guy named Groves and a guy named Harwell, which has nothing to do with how cool his old-school fantasy setting, Hawkmoor, really is. But if you think about it, it's an astonishing coincidence on more levels than one.
• Hank Harwell likes gaming in a world where the covers are lurid and the pages are yellow and flaking and dry your eyes out. But, oh, the thrills! Stock up on groovy pulp gaming stuff today! He's got a Car Wars adaptation and other material to share, too, at Adventure Street Labs!
• Carl Hewett called his Risus page The Flames of Risus for reasons only Carl Hewett can know. But it is a very keen collection of different ways to handle bonus-die gear, and assorted other notes on game-rules.
• Guy Hoyle is the benevolent dictator of the very groovy RisusTalk mailing list. He's also the twisted mind behind Vikings of the Caribbean, one of my favorite titles for anything, ever. Wander beyond that and you'll find yet more stuff! Wander over here and you'll find Encounter Risical, which makes even less sense than the two nonsensical things it combines (but in the best way).
• Tim Huntley who created the earlier (very nifty) Risus rules for Cthulhu-Style Sanity/Insanity stuff, and placed it along with other goodies in his Risus Document Thing (a PDF hosted at Box). It might be the only PDF with Risus stats for . . . itself!
• Jarrah James can't be bothered to keep up the accent, but fans of pirates won't mind as they enjoy Buccaneers and Basilisks: an ArrrRPG Setting!
• Peter Kisner plays with faeries - and you can, too, thanks to his Faery: The Twilight Land material.
• Michael Kurko on the other hand, playes with Elves and Dwarves and Balrogs. In One Risus to Rule Them All, he explores The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and the rest of Middle-Earth) in Risus terms.
• André Lacerte is too modest by half when he calls Million "another fantasy city." 'Cause it's groovy.
• Martin Lamontagne demonstrates that removing dice makes room for a lot more rules, with his recast of Risus as The Pretentious Edition. Dice, schmice!
• Lars Erik Larsen has explored several options for a Risus with less "ha ha" and more "bang bang" on his Risus Tenhut page. Tactical skirmish rules, Normandy in the wake of D-Day, and more!
• Zach Lazarus has a Risus page hereabouts. Plus, he has a name that would be great for an old-west type sheriff or marshall. Marshall Zach Lazarus. I'm totally using that.
• LiquidMax seems to like Risus a lot more than he likes watching Star Trek, judging by his very amusing Risus Trek parody.
• Boyd Mayberry sees Bunnies in Risus, and he sees them in Burrows. Huzzah! He also presents (as he puts it) "yet ANOTHER fantasy suplement for Risus." True, but this one has a cute bestiary, and the added charm of artwork from the Sparks Free-For-All. Groovy.
• David Masad likes a shot of paranoia in his brain-lite gaming, and his site includes Risus rules for the Illuminati and The Matrix to prove it (plus, the paranoia-enhancing advanced Illuminati rules)!
• Darrel D. Miller clearly has a much higher midichlorian count than I do (boy, that word sure stumped the spellchecker!) because he gave us Star Wars for Risus (and related madness)! Now, you too can seduce Aunt Beru while she wears those saucy mile-wide lapels. Hot-cha!
• David North takes Risus out west, complete with six-guns, marshalls, and armadillo stats in his Risus Wild West supplement. Pretty extensive equipment lists, very spiffy.
• Karl Paananen takes us through Time and Relative Dimensions in Space courtesy of his notes for Doctor Who conversion.
• John Payne shows us what a Real American Hero can be like in Risus terms. Be careful in any town called "Springfield," and beware men with chrome faces. Yo, Jo!
• Prince Mu-Chao has honored (or at least appropriately and respectfully insulted) Eris with The Wholey Book of Clichés and Cabbages. Come Friday, we'll all have a hot dog.
• George Pletz has a lot of cool Risus stuff on his webpage, including "Madcap" (what George calls "a technofear setting with a focus on black humor, biological terror, and dystopian conflict") and the brief-but-tasty Risus Recipes, adventure ideas amusingly assembled for your consideration. Chow down.
• David Prokopetz likes his math, and he likes his math crunchy. Like peanut butter. The crunchy kind. Only math. Hail the penguin king. "Never tell me the odds."
• Ben Reyes likes wooden ships in space, as you'll see in his creation, Gateway Falls. He describes it as "like Redwall meets Treasure Planet." Sounds groovy to me.
• Martin Runyon likes ships in space, too. Not so much on the wood, a little heavier on the Serenity. His adaptation of Firefly gives this lost-but-not-forgotten TV show the Risus touch.
• Manu Saxena joins the ranks of Risus writers who feel that Risus is just right for Cthulhu-style adventuring and insanity. It's particularly easy for me to understand the insanity part.
• MrGone is a kung-fu master of groovy character sheet designs, specializing in White Wolf sheets. What does he bring to Risus? Dots, of course! And handy fill-in-the-blanks interactive PDFs, too!
• Stefan Shirley gives us the Risus Monkey Jedi Academy, which sports a particularly groovy self-character-card, plus rules options and a stack of settings like Pulp Adventures in a Hard Solar System, a Risus adaptation of the Clone Wars cartoons and a lot more.
• Paul Stefko takes us to where cats and hard-light holograms play, with the Risus-based Red Dwarf RPG, and other fun stuff on his Risus Kitchen site.
• Nathan Stilwell sprinkles some World of Warcraft into Risus with Mobsplode.
• Dan Suptic maintains Risusiverse, one of the most active and varied Risus spots online (and he's written a number of awesome Risus items you can read there, too)!
• Christopher Thrash likes Risus and Traveller - Marc Miller's classic space-adventure RPG - so much that he created an alternate universe where they were one in the same. He called it Travelling Light, and it's one of those things that would never in a million years have occurred to me, but I'm glad Christopher thought of it!
• René Vernon is a busy regular on the Risus Mailing List, and he's compiled and organized his contributions into a meaty, spiffy webpage called Coloured Skies. Cool Risus stuff for nearly every aspect of the game.
• Bryce W. likes playing with small animals, or playing as small animals. In the middle ages. With swords. So it's only natural that he write Heroic Tails, an adaptation of the Redwall novels by Brian Jacques.
• Mark Whitley wrote some Risus material (fantasy and martial-arts stuff, with more to come) and then he did something entirely fascinating: He sent me the text of a blurb written for this page, describing it. It's sobering to realize that I might strike others as the kind of person who'd use the word "buncha." I was so stunned I gave the blurb its own page. Fantastic!
• Seth Williams the "Unknowner" has taken Risus to the ends of the Earth, or at least to the aftermath of a particularly nasty end, with Nomad 99, a "Psychepocaliptic" game inspired by a blend of eclectic elements. Deviant art, indeed!
• Michael Wolf provides some Risus notes for roleplaying on the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness, the Penny Arcade computer game.
• And finally, Brent Wolke does in 8 pages what some people take hundreds to do, and he does it over and over again. He deserves many hugs.

Risus in Other Languages

• Risus: il TuttoGDR is the Italian Translation by Max Lambertini.
• Risus: Das "Alles Geht" Rollenspiel is the German Translation by Achim Leidig. Florian Edlbauer also has a huge list of pulp clichés in German on his site.
• Risus: El JDR Para Todo is Risus in Spanish by Joaquín González. His PDF is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the original, right down to Spanish translations of the labels on the little dungeon map!
• Sistema Risus is the Portuguese Translation by Alexandre Amaral. His site also includes material for fashion-comedy ala Zoolander.
• Risus: Le jeu de rôle de tout is the French Translation (hosted locally) by celebrated French RPG writer Tristan Lhomme. In addition to the HTML version, it's available in Plain Text, Rich Text, and PDF (Adobe Acrobat) versions.
• Risus: Alt mulig rollespillet is Risus in Danish from "Hedgerow Hell" author Lars Erik Larsen. Even better than cream cheese, I kid you not.
• Risus: Igru Uloga O Bilo Cemu is Risus in Croatian, courtesy of translator Tomislav Šimat.
• Risus: Het "Alles" Rollenspel Bas Snabilie brings us Risus in Dutch on his very very colorful Risus website!
• Risus, in Czech! translator Howie (a.k.a. LittleLi) from the Czech Republic didn't add an "Anything RPG" tagline to the title, but he did a nice PDF (Adobe Acrobat) file for Czech RPG fans ready for a little brain-lite gaming. Break out the extended-set fonts (click here for a Rich Text version)!
• Risus, in Polish! Scroll down on this webpage for two versions of the Polish translation. The first is by Slawomir Wrzesien (RTF only); the second is the revision by Kamil Wegrzynowicz (RTF and PDF).
• Risus, in Japanese! is just kind of awesome, don't you think? Matt Creech did the work.
• Risus: Altmuligrollespillet is Risus in Norwegian, translated by Gorm Rødder, and you can snag it in several alternate file formats on this groovy page. I get the sense that it's a very funny page, based entirely on the theory that footnotes are always funny.
• Risus: La Ciuspeca Rolludo is Risus in Esperanto (hosted locally) translated by Chris Gledhill, which means Risus can now be enjoyed in a larger number of awesome sci-fi settings.
• Risus, in Korean! I'm not sure who did this Korean translation (hosted locally); it drifted in as flotsam on the Web. I want to give credit where it's due, though, so if you're out there, drop me a line!
• Risus, in Russian! Folks who know me know I have a special soft-spot for Russian history and folklore, so I find it extra-awesome that Andrey Makarov did a Russian translation (hosted locally).
• Risus, In English! Okay, it's not really a translation. It's just an HTML Version for those who want to read Risus in their web-browsers. And if you've read this far, have a wallpaper based on a Risus advertisement, and another wallpaper that's fun when tiled. Click here for the Open Directory Project Risus page, and here for the Google version.