Characters and Clichés

To help you get started with Risus, we expand upon the list of sample characters and cliches given in the basic Risus rules. We encourage you to add your own sample characters and cliches to the ones we provide here. We also encourage you to check out Anatomy of a Cliché, an excerpt from The Risus Companion.

Characters Sheets and Software

For making your own characters, there's both a Software page with assorted character generators and helpers, along with some character sheet printable files under the Characters section of the Risusiverse File Archive.

Character Galleries

For convenience' sake, we have broken down the lists of Characters and Clichés into genres (and, in some cases, sub-genres). These are not hard and fast categories, however; there's a tremendous amount of overlap between some categories. Shadowrun is Fantasy and Cyberpunk, for instance, while Star Wars is largely Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Stock Character Clichés - The All-Embracing, All-Inclusive, Funktastic Compendium of Stupendous Stock Characters and Superfluous Stereotypes. A nigh-universal list of cliches, suitable for use in a variety of genres.
Cliché Gallery - Big lists of standard clichés (you could say cliché clichés), sorted by setting.
Character Gallery - All sorts of interesting Risus characters, also sorted by setting.

Adding Your Characters and Clichés

Standard practice is to add your character or cliché to an existing genre of characters or clichés. Each genre has its own style and format for their content - you don't have to format your new content to match the current style, but unless there's a reason to buck the trend, the Risusiverse admin team may sneak in and format it for you.

If necessary, feel free to create a new genre type to the list - create a description on the Cliché Gallery page, and then create a sub-page for it. If you have a really cool character that you'd like to have on a page all to him/her/it/self, you can create a short description on the appropriate Character Gallery genre page, and then create a sub-page link from there.