Risus: The Anything RPG is a rules-light genre-agnostic role-playing game written, designed and illustrated by S. John Ross of Cumberland Games and Diversions and available for free on the web. It was first published online in 1993. Earlier versions of the game were titled GUCS: The Generic Universal Comedy System (a parody of GURPS) and were distributed privately beginning in 1989.
Risus is a comedy game (often described by its creator as a "joke game") and uses a cliché (character class) system inspired by the broad "career scale" skills in Greg Gorden's DC Heroes RPG (Mayfair Games), and later influenced by Atlas Games' Over the Edge. The core systems of Risus owe their largest debt to the Ghostbusters RPG published by West End Games, and to Tunnels and Trolls by Ken St. Andre. The game itself also cites GURPS as an influence, along with FUDGE, another free RPG released to the web a year earlier. Several more recent games have been, in turn, influenced by Risus.
Despite the game's small size and admittedly joking nature, there are more than 30 fan-authored websites devoted to Risus, some including several rules variants, simple worldbooks, and wholly rewritten adaptations of the game. Risus itself has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Danish, Dutch, and Czech. In December, 2003, Cumberland Games began to support the free game with commercial supplements, beginning with the Risus Companion and the founding of the International Order of Risus.
External links
