In Discworld, you no longer have to fear shenanigans ruining your game. They ARE the game!
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork (AiAM) Kickstarter has roughly two weeks to go and has already surpassed $1.5 million dollars. For those new to the series, let’s just say it involves fantasy shenanigans.
Shenanigans
Players pull them; DMs sigh and live with them. It’s a cosmic dance played out between the rulesiest lawyers and the linguistic…let’s call them criminals.
With the Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, you no longer have to fear those pesky shenanigans ruining your game. They are the game!
Welcome to Discworld
Discworld is a humorous fantasy series written by the English author Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat planet. That is balanced on the backs of four elephants. That stand on the back of a giant turtle. The series started back in 1983 with The Colour of Magic and continued until the final novel The Shepherd’s Crown, which was published in 2015, following Pratchett’s death.
Modiphius has taken advantage of Sir Terry’s tendency to treat language and storytelling like a fun children’s game. You have no stats, only descriptors. It’s not necessarily the most novel (heh!) approach to gaming; many systems have taken the same approach before (Powered by the Apocalypse springs to mind as a for-instance), but it reaches its most natural home in the flat disc of a world, supported on the backs of four giant elephants, who in turn stand upon the back of Great A’tuin, the cosmic turtle.
For a complete breakdown of the rules, check out the free-to-download quickstart rules.
How It Works
Here is a quick overview:
- Scenes: The game is based around various scenes. This includes combat, heists, investigations, meetings, afternoon tea, dinner, supper…you get the idea.
- Narrativium: This is the name for the story that would happen if the PCs didn’t intervene. It’s the story that the world wants to tell and it’s your job as intrepid keepers of the peace (you are members of the watch in this quickstart set) to ruin the world’s plans at every turn.
- Tests and Traits: Tests are the method by which you thwart Narrativium and Traits are the instruments you utilize to complete the Tests. Your character is made of Traits. Your name is a Trait. Your species is a Trait. You are a Trait.
- Consequences: This is the fun part for the GM. There’s a rule of life: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong and everything can go wrong. I may have added that last bit. The point is that your actions have consequences and the GM gets to dish them out, to various degrees of severity. (quick note for GMs: Death is a character on the Disc, not a fun consequence…try to have fun).
That’s pretty much it. The rest of the quickstart guide is a short adventure involving the comically explosive swamp dragons native to the Disc and a mystery which obviously I can’t (or won’t) talk about. All that’s left after that are the standard pre-generated characters for you to choose from.
Should You Get It?
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork looks like a lovingly crafted approach to one of fantasy’s most beloved second-hand set of dimensions and should be both a hoot and a holler for those willing to have a little fun. If you like the quickstart, check out this livestream from Modiphius. Go forth and back it … and pull every shenanigan you can!
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