Risus Mariachi!

The Risus Monkey would like to welcome Dan Suptic's Risus Mariachi to the site. The poor thing was homeless and busking for tamales outside a local cantina when Silverlode's Arturo Ramirez recognized a kindred spirit. Whether your choice of foes include hoards of sleezy vampire whores or crazy Icelandic Ninjas (!), you're bound to be entertained by this most excellent Risus supplement.

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!

More Dragonspire Updates

I'm really on-the-ball this week. The Dragonspire updates from last session have been posted. Note that we have a new non-player character (Silva Karen) with a full write-up.

Blogger

I'm in the process of updating the Risus Monkey to use Blogger. I liked how I had the site before, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to edit the posts by hand. Besides, it would be nice to have the ability for users to comment on posts. I do miss the image of Sam the Astromonkey, but he still exists on the "About" page.

Now that I'm using professional blogging software, I hope that I'll find it easier to post new updates. I still have a batch of Dragonspire updates that are waiting to be posted, a Silverlode episode summary that needs to be written, characters, settings, conversions, and other miscellaneous odds and ends.

Oh, yeah, I have a new non-Risus blog at www.velvet-edge.com.

Dragonspire Updates

(Originally posted Thursday, Febraury 16, 2006)

I have posted updates to the adventures, characters, lexicon, and locations pages of Dragonspire. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to post more complete updates after tomorrow night's session.

Taking Care Of My Baby

(Originally posted Thursday, Febraury 9, 2006)

The Risus Monkey has been dormant as of late because my wife is out of town and I've had double parenting duties. Not much time for blogging when one is constantly taking care of an infant. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking about what to do when I have free time again. There's been some talk over at Risus Talk about the possibility of creating a Risus webzine, similar to Fudge Factor. I think it's a super idea and I will certainly be involved in some fashion. The webzine may or may not wind up here on this site. If not, I'm still going to maintain the Risus Monkey as a home for my own campaigns, as well as a place to blog about anything that doesn't quite warrant full webzine treatment.