We always had faith Modiphius’ official Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG would do for mainstream tabletop roleplaying games what Terry Pratchett’s magnificent novels did for classic pulp fantasy: warp it, parody it, break the rules, and create something entirely unique and captivating.
From our very early chats with Modiphius founder Chris Birch, it was clear Adventures in Ankh-Morpork would be swerving well clear of familiar tropes found in the best tabletop roleplaying games already out there – eschewing detailed combat, for example. Instead, designers were mining Pratchett’s books for ideas on how to let its world, and stories, speak for themselves, without traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-style RPG mechanics gumming up the creative juices.
Achieving that while still offering a coherent, working game (rather than a loose sourcebook) is a tricky task – and we won’t know for sure how successful they’ve been until we have the game’s (undoubtedly joke-stuffed) core rulebook in our sweaty little mitts. But now, with the Discworld RPG Kickstarter touching off in mere weeks, Wargamer has snatched a clacks interview with three members of Modiphius’ team, to nail down what fans can expect from their first adventure into Ankh-Morpork.
First off, we delve into gameplay, species, magic, maps, and wanton misuse of rules with designer Andy Douthwaite and line editor Bryce Johnston. Beware, all ye who enter: here there be footnotes.*
*If you’ve ever read a Pratchett novel, you know the drill.
Wargamer: Which of the Discworld races can you play as, and what kinds of rules are going to represent them?
Modiphius: The different species found perambulating around Ankh-Morpork have been split into three broad categories for character creation: the Usual suspects, the Unusual suspects, and the Downright Bizarre suspects. We’ve provided some guidance and descriptions for the most common of these, like humans, dwarfs, and trolls, to the more unusual, like gargoyles and Igors, as well the extremely unusual, like sapient magical creatures and items. However, as long as you can describe a species, you can play as them.
This is because the system is very much based on words rather than numbers, so if you’re playing as a troll, you won’t be getting +4 Strength or anything like that. But if you are a troll, you can use that to your advantage when trying to wrangle a better chance on a test out of the GM when doing something trollish.*
*be that whacking someone on the head or, under the right circumstances, figuring out the fundamental mathematics of the universe.
Are there character “classes” or similar, or is character creation more open-ended?
There are parts of character creation that are class adjacent, in that they look at classes from other TTRPGs and shuffle sheepishly around a corner. The focus is more on what type of group you are playing. In Pratchett’s work, people of a similar bent tend to flock together
like startled waterfowl (that’s probably enough animal comparisons for now). As such the first thing you’ll be deciding on is who you are going to play, will you be student wizards? Beggars? Seamstresses?
The whole weird and varied melting pot of Ankh-Morpork is your
mollusc (okay one more). It’s also worth pointing out that even if you decide to build your group around student wizards, say, most of the characters could be not-wizards. You could play a Bledlow like Alf Nobbs (no relation), an escaped spellbook (no relation), or a groundskeeper like Modo (whose relationship status to Corporal C.W. St John Nobbs is never clarified).
How does magic work – or is it beyond the player characters?
Magic works the same as any other test, just with more luck and greater consequences. Failure to get information from C.M.O.T. Dibbler will likely leave you holding a sausage you really don’t want to eat, failing a spell may have more… unusual consequences.
Is there anything in the rules themselves that will help to generate comedy and satire, or is that all going to come in the adventures?
Anything that tries to force funniness usually ends up being deeply sad; like the Fools’ Guild or mimes. That being said, we’ve provided many examples that will hopefully help people set the tone for their games and remind them to embrace the more silly aspects of Discworld.
Unless they don’t want to. It is of course completely possible to embrace the more serious elements of Discworld stories. The books themselves are usually extremely funny right up until you run into a sentence or paragraph that makes you have to go away and think for several hours and then change your entire philosophy. Those moments of deep philosophical reality are always embedded in humour though, so even the most serious campaigns should contain a minimum of 3 PPM.*
*Puns Per Minute
Discworld stories often tend towards investigation, with the occasional action scene. How have you shaped up the rules to support that?
There is no specific framework for combat like in other popular games. Discworld is not a setting defined by combat or fighting; those things frequently exist, but the focus is never on them. Even when there’s a war or a mighty battle, those things happen offscreen, and are often a result of a failure of communication or negotiation.
As a result, all tests in the game use the same mechanics, whether you’re trying to avoid being axed at the knee by an angry dwarf, or you’re hunting in the Library for that one specific book that you don’t remember the name of but the cover was red and it turned out
they were twins.
What’s the most outlandish creature you’ve statted up for the game? Swamp dragons? Dungeon dimension denizens?
Stats? In our wordplay based pun-stravaganza of a game? Seems unlikely.
Have you added any Discworld-specific skills?
The answer to this one is a resounding yes, and at the same time, an emphatic no.
There are no “Skills” in Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. There are however traits, many many traits. These are created by the players but we want to encourage you to make each and every one of them as “Discworldy” as possible.
NPCs, including some of the main characters in Discworld, will have traits too, to allow your player characters to interact with them during
your games.
How have you dealt with the number between seven and nine?
The core book is only 7 pages long, to account for this problem.*
*This may or may not be true. You’ll have to buy it to find out if we’re telling the truth or having a fun little jape at your expense.**
**This might even be a caper.
Will the first book put a heavy focus on one part of the setting, or just a light gloss on all of it?
The name of the game is Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, which sort of provides a useful hint towards which area of the Disc is going to be the focus for this one. There is a slight lean towards the Watch and the Wizards, largely because those two organisations are the ones in
Ankh-Morpork we have the most information about, but we’ve covered the whole city.*
*At least those parts of it that aren’t currently on fire, extremely magically radioactive, or Boring.
Modiphius’ boss Chris mentioned the possibility of procedural generation for Ankh Morpork – did that idea make it in?
The answer here is: sort of. In terms of the denizens of Ankh-Morpork, at least those that aren’t named characters, these can be generated by the fistful by GMs eager to add their own mark on the city. There are also random events and general weirdness that groups can encounter.
As for the city itself, yes and no. There are no maps included in the game. There’s a plethora of maps of Ankh-Morpork out there (both official and unofficial) but most mapping we’ve done is in the style of historical maps where the key locations are completely out of scale with everything around them (and usually in the wrong place).
We wanted the game to feel like when you’re in a big city, you may not know that half a mile away there’s a pub called the Startled Squirrel, but you know the City Hall is in the middle, and you can see the big spire of St Wuthering’s In the Bush nearby. The major landmarks and their locations are all described in the books and we want to encourage players to follow their noses and head from A to B filling in the gaps themselves.
Pratchett was sometimes a bit changeable about the precise locations of things in Ankh-Morpork himself,* and in that vein, we encourage GMs to never let geography get in the way of a good story.
*Probably because of quantum.
We love a good random generation table – do you have anything like that for creating spontaneous Discworld nonsense?
Oh yes! Everything from creating your characters to random NPCs and encounters can be left to the whims of the dice (if you’re so inclined) with examples and entries that capture the tone of Discworld quite nicely, even if we do say so ourselves.
Are the books going to be set in any particular ‘era’ of Discworld – will it be up to date as of the events of The Shepherd’s Crown, or earlier, when Vimes was Captain rather than a Lord?
Yes! Adventures in Ankh-Morpork is set right before the events of Thud and Going Postal. So the Watch is filled out with many different species, Vimes is His Grace, His Excellency, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes (as well as, of course, Blackboard Monitor) and the clacks and the newspapers exist, but the deeper industrial revolution stuff hasn’t quite kicked off yet.
How hard will it be for players to get their hands on a Sapient Pearwood chest like the luggage?
The Luggage is unique in Ankh-Morpork so if players want it they’re going to have to ask it (or Rincewind) very very nicely if they can have it and see how well that goes for them. Or try to take it, although that’s a really easy way to have a chat with a certain tall chap with a scythe. Finding a different Sapient Pearwood chest in Ankh-Morpork is a tall order, although of course, anything’s possible, as my dear mother used to say.*
*She’s not dead, she just stopped saying it after she lost all that money on the horses.
The starter adventure for a game often sets the scene for what players should expect from a system – what have you got planned?
The quickstart is a one shot filled to the brim with the Watch, investigation, a potential for cheese jousting, and dragons (no dungeons though, unless things go horribly off track).
What have you done in the game to make sure playing it feels like a Discworld experience? Or is the standard nonsense of a group of RPG players more than enough to ensure it hits that special blend of comedy, commentary, and fantasy?
Punes, or plays on words. No Discworld book would be complete without them, therefore no Discworld RPG can be either.
The system itself encourages players to deliberately misinterpret, wrangle, and twist meanings of even perfectly innocent words to get the best chance of succeeding on a test. Combine this with your usual TTRPG group nonsense and you’re well on your way to an adventure in Ankh-Morpork.
PPM* is in the 6-8 range, but with the right group you can really get this baby cruising along in the low teens. We recommend staying below 20 though, or you’ll void your warranty.
*Puns Per Minute, we discussed this earlier, keep up.
Thanks folks – good luck hitting the necessary PPM!
We’re not quite finished on the Disc yet, though – Wargamer also nabbed a bit of time with Samantha Webb, Modiphius’ head of brand, to sniff out some hints at exactly what we’re getting in October’s Kickstarter launch. She didn’t let a lot slip, but we learned enough to set our “silly collectibles” senses tingling…
Wargamer: Are there any audacious stretch goals?
Webb: You’ll have to wait and see! We’ve had loads of discussions as a team about what truly special things we can offer while keeping the Kickstarter manageable and delivered on time.
We even did a tier listing of the kinds of stretch goals you typically see, and how good they actually are, and I’m a big supporter of actual content expansions being like A tier or S tier.
So we’re not looking to pull the wool over backers’ eyes with some silly or obnoxious goal on the far horizons of funding. Saying that, for £3 million we’ll unlock some woolly sunglasses for every single backer, even the ones who only pledge a quid.*
*We won’t. Or will we!!!?**
**No.
Why fund the book via Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is a platform like no other, giving you a way to reach hundreds of thousands of potential players that you’d need to work doubly hard to reach on several social media and marketing platforms.
Kickstarters also have a life, an identity, and the campaign’s Story is a fantastic, concise, expression of what we have to offer in terms of a game. Kickstarter, being a direct-to-customer platform (i.e. we don’t sell to distributors, who sell to stores, who sell to you) means we can also offer some unique items.
Look out for some beautiful accessories and some unexpected rewards at higher tiers. So we’re not just funding the book, we’re funding everything a group needs to get the best Discworld RPG experience they can, along with some fantastic collector’s items too.
How will you ensure you deliver on time for the legions of eager Discworld fans?
We find that a suitably motivated workforce can deliver anything on time. Andy’s doing four hours a day in the scorpion pit, which is doing a lovely job of keeping him focused, and Bryce only sleeps five hours a night so he can work on this game for more of each day.*
We make sure to give our staff regular beatings to improve morale, and certainly we haven’t had any complaints from the survivors.**
*Also because he has a toddler.
**The honest answer here is that we started development early, and we’re being careful to not overpromise, but that’s sadly quite boring.
You’re a small team and this could be a massive Kickstarter – how are you going to handle that without going pop?
We’ve carefully planned the Kickstarter so the scope of the project won’t just exponentially bloat with the success of the funding. Backers are much more aware compared to ten or fifteen years ago, and I think they can recognise a project that is overpromising what it can deliver in its projected timeline.
Projects used to promise more and more content—particularly RPG Kickstarters offering more supplementary rulebooks—all within the same fulfilment schedule. It’s just not realistic, and Modiphius have even been guilty of that in the past, there’s no hiding that.
That’s why we’re talking as a company about the sustainability of our Kickstarter projects, so we’ve struck a balance for this, and future
projects, that offers more value the better we do, while being able to deliver in under a year.
Thanks, Samantha!
Per the official preview page, the Discworld RPG Kickstarter will go live on Tuesday, October 15, 2024. We’ll be here then, eagerly crunching down everything that’s included – in the meantime, you can always follow Wargamer on Google News for daily updates across all of tabletop town!
Source: Wargamer
