Risus: Thirty Years!

We're almost out of 2023!

This year has been the 30th Anniversary of Risus: The Anything RPG, the 20th Anniversary of The Risus Companion, and the 10th Anniversary of Risus 2nd Edition.

As I write this, we're at the end of December, and I feel like I should raise a glass to Risus before the year is done. I've kept quiet so far because I think it would be unseemly, nowadays, for me to parade the Risus name too much. But, 30, 20 and 10 years are worth taking a moment for, so I'll mark the triple-occasion with a story from the youngest of the three celebrants, the 2nd Ed:

It was a scary Colorado day, for the time had come to draw the Little Cartoon Bastards (the name my stick-figure "art" takes when the sticks pose specifically for Risus).

I always dreaded that part.

Not from dislike! I love the little idiots, and they represent the best of what Risus can be, but I can't draw. That's not some false-modesty thing. I hardcore can't draw. I can't-draw at a world-class level. I could fail to draw at the Olympics and win the can't-draw gold. Almost every Risus "illustration" took several drafts, and came from many false starts, and for every one that made the cut, there were six or seven that didn't, because they were worse.

But, the time had come, so I'd sit around doodling when I was hanging out with my players, hoping some of those doodles would work out.

Around that time, a Risus supporter I was following online got a guitar, and he was super happy about it, and his joy over it felt infectious, so I thought: "I should have a guitar-playing LCB for the new edition, as a shout-out to that gamer's new guitar!"

And I liked that idea almost too much? Like, I wasn't willing to let it go. I had a vibe in my mind and I wanted an LCB who would deliver that vibe: a triumphant vibe, a rock-and-roll-fantasy vibe. A happy LCB, shredding with joy.

But, see above. I cannot draw. So, it's a terrible, heartbreaking idea for me to develop artistic ambitions, no matter how humble.

I did something like 20 gods-forsaken drafts of guitar-playing stickmen. And they all suuuuuuucked.

I did many from pure imagination, and many from photographic reference. I searched the Web for classic images of triumphant guitar poses from the likes of Hendrix, Prince, Van Halen, Clapton, Page, Zappa, Buddy Frickin' Holly ... hoping that their moments of triumph could give me that triumphant vibe.

And if I could draw, that approach would have worked. I would have had the skill, the eye, the insight necessary to translate some of those moments into something sticklike.

But, see above. I cannot draw.

So, I was sad, I was adrift. I wanted a triumphant guitar guy. I couldn't let go of wanting that piece. But the chasm between my approach, and that desire, was blocking my path.

It took me a few weeks of beating my head against that wall before the tweety-birds circling my head got me a light bulb, out of pity.

It came to me when I was waking from a snooze, and I scooted to the computer to search for new references. This time, I was no longer searching for rock stars or guitar legends ... I was searching for people IMAGINING they were rock stars and guitar legends. I searched for pictures of people playing, not guitar, but AIR GUITAR.

Go ahead and try it. You'll see what I saw (well, ten years later, you'll see the equivalent of what I saw): that is the triumph I was craving. Not the reality of shredding guitar, but the fantasy of it, the love of it, the roleplay of it. The absolute frickiting nonsense of it. I wanted the joy of the daydreamer, and the air-guitar people are the people who GET that, and deliver it all the time, so I loaded my eyeballs with air-guitar triumphs and air-guitar dreams, and I stood, and I shredded some air of my own, because I knew this was was the missing piece that would snap the chasm shut, so I could stride across, as if I'd always known how.

I got it on the first (new) try. The little dude danced from my pen without further iteration. A triumphant doodle, by a guy who can't draw, of a triumphant performance, by a guy who can't play.

But we can pretend. Happy anniversary, little game (almost belated!), and here comes 2024.

May we all shred triumphant.

Love Nest

Correspondent Diederik Van Arkel made a request for more nitty-gritty posts on how I produce graphics, in response to my post about 1-bit images. I expect I'll do a lot of that over time, but I'll begin by describing what my Life Cycle of a Simple Risus Map only hints at: the way I construct a Risus map-graphic by working back-and-forth (and back, and forth, and back, and forth) between rasters and vectors.

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In Toast of the Town, a Risus fantasy module you can snag for free if you'd like, the PCs are likely to meet a group of NPCs trapped underground in a place called the Nest, a repurposed room accessible from the town's sewers. Toast of the Town isn't a dungeon-crawl, so there's no real need to map the tunnels, but I felt a simple diagram of the Nest would be useful for the Game Master.

All Risus graphics are stick-figure drawings, which gives the game and its support material a goofy warmth I enjoy, and leverages my own absolute inability to draw. Like, I really can't draw. I do drafts of the stick-figures. And then sometimes the final stick-figure is a composite of parts of the drafts, because none of the individual drafts were tolerable. It's that bad.

So, while I have a decent visual sense and can make a pretty map if I want to, a Risus map needs to feel like Risus, which means it needs to be more like a "doodle" than a "drawing." With that in mind, let's follow the steps, to see how I use both Photoshop and Illustrator in a funky back-and-forth to get the doodle I want.

Step One: Scribble in the Art-Hole

Since this is a minor map and doesn't rate a full page, I wanted to fit the map to the page instead of the other way around. So, working with a draft of the laid-out module (you can see bits of copy poking in at the edges), I doodled the first draft directly onto the page, so I'd be 100% sure it would fit the aspect ratio of the "art hole" (what a lot of us call copy-spaces left empty for forthcoming illustrations). The original plan was to have the map where the hole was situated. As in all other creative pursuits, the plan didn't survive to the end, but that's usually a good sign.

It's Supposed to Be a Circle. My High-School Art Teacher Coddled Me.

As you can see, the very-basics are present: a round room with crushed radiating corridors, and two ways to get in: the secret door from the "sewers," and the tunnel leading to a kitchen basement that plays its own role in the adventure. Note my perfect handwriting. Even I'm no longer sure what word I'm labeling the radiating corridors with. Robe? Pole? This is why I'm a good typist.

Step Two: First Pass in Illustrator

In Adobe Illustrator, even a yutz like me can draw a circle and perfect straight lines, so the next step is a simplistic line-drawing using the Pen tool and some basic shapes in pure Illustrator vectors. While I want the map to be a doodle, I want it to be a better doodle than my doodle. I want the circle to be circular and the radiating corridors, crushed though they are, to be a uniform width in their non-crushed places.

In Illustrator, Even a Schmuck Like Me Can Almost Draw

Step Three: Tracing it to Pieces

I print out the Illustrator drawing, and trace it using a Flair marker (all Risus graphics are drawn with a Flair for consistency, and because that was the pen I chewed the most in grade school). At this point, I'm doing the actual doodle I'll use for the module, so the perfect circle acts as a guide, but I'm adding little notches to indicate grooves or supports in the walls, and I'm adding speckles of texture, and furniture and things: everything I know should be there ... sort of.

All Secret Sewer-Temples Available Pre-Furnished.
Ask Your Leasing Agent.

Because this is a planned process, I know I don't need to draw every piece of furniture, and I know I don't need to draw everything in its correct place, so I don't. I know I'll need more than three bits of bedding, for example, but I know that three different bedding symbols will be sufficient, in the final graphic, to make the whole thing feel hand-drawn, so I only draw three. What I'm doing is creating pieces, that I'll later be able to copy-paste and rotate and place correctly. I don't even attempt to draw the door in its correct place, because I know I'll only mess that up!

Step Four: Digital Tracing and Layout

I scan the Flair doodle at high resolution, and, in Photoshop, I simplify it to a 1-bit raster, and clean away any schmutz I don't want. I leave the lines in their rough, natural state for now.

At This Stage It's Just Like Playing in a Mapping Program

I leave Photoshop and bring the image over to Illustrator, where I use the Live Trace feature (Illustrator CS2 to CS5) or Image Trace feature (Illustrator CS6 onward) to trace it. When I first developed this technique for A Kringle in Time, I did the tracing in Adobe Streamline, and you can also use Corel Trace or the Potrace function built in to InkScape, or other methods. In digital graphics, "tracing" programs are those that create vectors from rasters. Tracing can be messy and fraught, and it's only a good idea in very specific instances ... but a simple line-drawing like this map is one of them.

Once the trace completes, I can expand the tracing and group together lines into sensible objects: crates, distilling gear (there's some alchemy, of a kind, happening in the Nest) bedding and so on. Since each object is a group of vectors, I can grab them with my mouse, move them around, duplicate them, spin them, mirror them and so on - they're now just symbols I can use at my discretion, including some stacking (that little pile of three crates I make). In this step, I use the vector-pieces to assemble the map into its final configuration.

Step 5: Smoothing

It's time to leave Illustrator and go back to Photoshop. I rasterize the map at a high resolution, and I apply a nice Gaussian Blur filter to it. Then I "harden" the blurred image by using the Contrast sliders (refer to the graphic for the slider settings). This trick is essential to the Risus look, which always has that kind of smoothing applied to my rough Flair ink-lines. Everything I'm doing to this map, I do to the LCBs (the stick-figures are called the LCBs; it means Little Cartoon Bastards).

To finish this step, I once again drop my bitmap to 1-bit, that magical, lovely format.

Step 6: Tinting and Finishing

So far, we've done a doodle, then an Illustrator drawing, then a physical tracing, then a cleaned-up scan, then a digital tracing, then some "refurnishing" in Illustrator, then rasterizing and smoothing in Photoshop. So we've gone from vector, to tracing, to raster, to vector, to raster again. Yikes. And now it's time to go back from raster to vector!

Vectors are Cold, Doodles are Warm.
When Combining Them, The Warmth Wins Out, Overall.

Back in Illustrator's cold embrace, I digitally trace this new 1-bit graphic, resulting in a new vector. But this time, the goal isn't to arrange the furniture, just to color it. Toast of the Town has a very specific "pale chocolate mint" color palette, which every stick-figure/doodle graphic conforms to, and I begin the finishes by hand-selecting each part of the new trace and applying the relevant color swatches. I finish the finishes by applying the labels, complete with label "halos" to keep the label text from blending too cleanly with the mappity background.

Amusingly (perhaps) the part I'm glossing over is that I create those halos with an entirely separate series of vector-to-raster-to-vector techniques (in photoshop I thicken the label text with a crude application of the Minimize filter, and then smooth it out with that same Gaussian Blur followed by extreme contrast).

Eventually, I end up with a nicely-layered Illustrator document, with map layers underneath label layers, and every visible thing a result of these multiple passes between raster and vector.

This is a Raster of the Final Vectors,
Which Means I Did it AGAIN. I'm Cruel to Doodles.
Click to Embiggen, if You're Into That.

Now, obviously, this is a lot of planning and a lot of steps to end up with a doodle map, and you're probably too cool for doodle maps. I get that. You are super cool; I've always said so. But if your brain is a creative brain, you're already seeing how this technique can apply to many other kinds of carefully-constructed graphics, and you'd be right about that.

If you're an experienced wizard with these tools, you might also be thinking: couldn't this be simplified by smoothing the raster before moving between Steps 2 and 3? It's true that I can, technically, shave a step there, and Risus Game Masters might never notice the difference. The reason I don't is the (beautiful) way the Gaussian technique smooths overlapped lines. Just a moment of reflection should reveal what I mean, but if you're still doubtful, try it yourself, and compare both methods using symbols that you overlap in Step 4. Look carefully at the overlap points in the final image. It's a tiny thing, I know, but this is what I get when I combine my zeal for excellence with my focus on ... badly-drawn stick art. If nothing else, this is how we get our recommended daily allowance of irony. Stay healthy, folks, and remember: my inbox is always open.

Chatting With Fiona Howat

Of possible interest if you enjoy me rambling: you can hear me doing it in a more verbal, slightly growly, managing-to-blank-on-Greg-Stafford's-name sort of way thanks to Fiona Howat at the What Am I Rolling podcast.

The emphasis is mainly on Risus: The Anything RPG and Uresia: Grave of Heaven, but with some fruitful wanderings into other matters roleplayerly. Fiona's graciousness shines through as clearly as my befuddled fogeyhood, I think. She GM'ed some Risus on her podcast this past December and this amounts to a kind of post-system followup, which I enjoyed a bunch!

Save That Which Lives

Nobody reads Risus: The Anything RPG and says "Hey S. John, was that a nod to Eitri, King of the Dwarves, who Peter Dinklage played in Avengers: Infinity War?" For a variety of reasons, they just don't. But yeah. That one goes out to King Eitri. And so does this rambling explanation:

In 1986, I got a job at a game-and-comic store in North Carolina, and those would be my first real days as a gamer. In one of my earliest conversations there, everyone got to talking about cool magic items.

They were just citing their favorites from the DMG or Judges Guild books or issues of White Dwarf and Dragon, but I didn't know that. As a gaming noob, I had no frame of reference. I thought they were extruding these things from spinnerets near their butts.

When it came my turn, it took a half-heartbeat of panic to remember I did have a favorite magic item! I DID.

So I relaxed, and droned in my best faux-fantasy-serious-guy voice that my favorite was "a blade, which will cleave through ALL ... [dramatic pause, dramatic rise of the eyebrows] ... save that which lives."

"Oooooh," said Nick, one of the gamers. "That'd be kind of frustrating but kind of fun. Lots of creative uses."

Pat added "That's why I like the Decanter of Endless Water. You can really surprise a DM with that!"

I didn't know what a Decanter of Endless Water was, but it sounded cool. I kept burbling: "Like, you couldn't really stab a guy with it but you could wreck his sword and armor ..."

"And whatever he's standing on, too!" said Nick. There was a collective nod of approval, as everyone mulled it over.

Then the conversation passed to the next person, and I had survived my turn. I had contributed a favorite without embarrassment. I felt guilty that everyone else had spinnerets near their butts, but I had, at least, survived.

I'd go on to put some version of that sword in several of my campaigns, and it sparked a lifelong interest in magic and powers with multiple, non-obvious uses. After becoming a storied blade of many campaigns, it popped up in my old homebrew Talisman cards (Blue Room fans may remember those) and of course, it gets a passing nod on page one of Risus. It's had different mechanics and origin-stories and in-world "rules" but it cleaves ... to its origins in an X-Men Annual from 1985.

That's Sam Guthrie (Cannonball of New Mutants) and King Eitri, after Sam and friends had an adventure in Asgard that rocked my lil' adolescent socks. There was, and is, nothing interesting about the armor. But a super magic stabby thing that can't really stab anyone ... it stuck in my memory because, before I was ever a gamer, it still sent my imagination running in a superhero-fan way: how would Sam use this new power? Does it stop at flesh or just ghost through? Would he let the other New Mutants know about it? Will he give away the armor? He's already pretty much invulnerable when he's blastin', etc ...

Anyway. That's why – beyond seeing Peter Frickin' Dinklage in an Avengers movie – the sight of Eitri gave me a bonus inward smile, recalling that he once forged me a favorite, and it's lasted.

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If you're curious to read of the New Mutants' adventure in Asgard (including the X-Men Annual I mentioned) that story is currently available in both digital and physical form from Marvel as New Mutants Classic, Vol. 5.