No One Escapes From Village 13!

For your daily dose of Risus goodness, Berin Kinsman has the ultimate in "chocolate in my peanut butter". His crazy-brilliant idea is to cross Hogan's Heroes with the Prisoner. Sounds like an amazing Risus one-shot or mini-campaign!

Risus with Cards

The Risus Monkey is coming out of cold sleep to report on a new set of Risus rules over at the Risusiverse. The Ruminator has written rules for playing Risus with a deck of playing cards here. They are supposedly based on some old TSR game. To me, they greatly resemble the rules for one of my favorite games of all time - Castle Falkenstein! I've always had a thing for card-based systems, though I do confess that I have never had great success using one in play. But the idea of using cards seems rather cool. For certain settings and genres, like Deadlands or Falkenstein, they just seem to be especially appropriate.

Stalin's Monkey Man

From Wired News (12/21/05)...
Stalin's Monkey Man
In need of Soviet supermen to build his workers' utopia, Josef Stalin ordered the creation of half-man, half-ape creatures during the 1920s, The Scotsman reports. Recently uncovered papers document the Soviet dictator's enlistment of Ilya Ivanov, Russia's top animal-breeding scientist, to help create the "living war machine" Stalin desired. "I want a new, invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat," Stalin reportedly told the scientist. With $200,000 funding, Ivanov went to West Africa to experiment on chimpanzees. But the mad research failed, and the scientist went from chimps to chump: Exiled to Kazakhstan in 1931, he died a year later, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.
Sounds like a great adventure nugget for a Pulp/Atomic-Horror Risus game!