Using Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork as a Resource for the Discworld RPG (pt. 2)

Part one of this set of notes discussed the general idea of, well, what the title says; in this and the final part, I'll take a quick run through the scenarios that have so far been published by Modiphius. Once again, I'll abbreviate the (original GURPS-based) Discworld Roleplaying Game as "DRPG", and the new Discworld: Adventures in Ank-Morpork RPG as "DAiAM". The published material for the former consists of:

1. A PDF-only "Quickstart" booklet.
2. The Kickstarter backers' version of the core rulebook.
3. The smaller retail version of the same rules (which differs in the included scenarios as well as in format).
4. A very slim "Gamemaster's Toolkit" booklet which doesn't include any scenarios (but does include a lot of random event, encounter, and scenery generation tables that could be useful to any Discworld GM, especially one running games set in Ankh-Morpork or a similar city).
5. The Lesser-Known Streets of Ankh-Morpork, which provides extra details on the city and some of its inhabitants and visitors. This again doesn't include any scenarios.
6. The Night Before Hogswatch, a short supplement built around a single scenario but also discussing the general idea of using anthropomorphic personifications as PCs in DAiAM.
7. Tales from the Big Wahoonie, a collection of scenarios.
8. Ankh-Morpork Through the Ages, which covers running games in different time-periods in the history of the Disc, and provides a scenario for each of them.

In addition, "Bad Eggs in the Big City", a scenario which appears in the retail rulebook but not in the Kickstarter backers' version, has been supplied to those backers in PDF form. Anyway, I'll tackle these things in that order.

To begin with, though, I'll say that these aren't generally bad scenarios, in my opinion, though they do tend to be loosely designed and plotted. However, if the PCs are insufficiently enterprising or suffer poor dice luck, the GM may have to become rather heavy-handed about dropping the clues that they'll need if the scenario isn't going to bog down. GMs using the DRPG rules shouldn't have too much trouble preparing or improvising stats for NPCs as required, but some of these scenarios will require more such preparation or improvisation than others.

The Quickstart Booklet: This includes one scenario, "Up in Smoke," an adventure for Watch characters, specifically a detective mystery which could be useful to anyone running a Watch game under any system. Like many of these scenarios, it's structured very much as a set of locations, with clues to be found in each of them that lead to others. Several of the NPCs potentially appearing are actually characters from the books and are detailed in the DRPG, while only one of the others really requires anything like a full character sheet.

The Kickstarter Backers' Rulebook: This contains three starter scenarios, for three different types of party - so anyone looking to plug things into an existing campaign will likely only be able to use one of them at most. In all three cases, I suspect that PCs will end up in a number of significant interactions and possibly conflict with different NPCs, so they may require a bit more preparation and adaptation than "Up in Smoke". Looking at each of the three in turn:

• "Not-So-Grand Larceny" is for Thieves' Guild members, and is essentially a fairly basic heist-with-complications; the PCs are given a target, they go there with one stop along the way, they go in and do the job, and they get out. I can imagine some players more or less ignoring the intermediate stop, but it has a number of random encounters which are designed to give the PCs options for the heist; the GM may have to ladle these out rather flagrantly. The actual heist has a few predictable complications, plus one bigger one which is the result of howling stupidity on the part of an NPC.
• "Little Women" is another Watch scenario, albeit slightly less of a trail-of-clues than "Up in Smoke" (and with some unsubtle, if valid, social commentary thrown in). The elements in the various locations and scenes that lead to others may be too easy for PCs to miss, leaving the players at loose ends unless, again, the GM abandons subtlety, and I suspect that some groups may find the ending a bit anticlimactic.
• "Fundamentals of Unseen Academia" is for Unseen University student PCs. This is simply a series of chaotic scenes in a random order, with a fairly large cast of NPCs in each; GMs who want to run it are going to have to improvise a lot, whatever rules they're using.

The Retail Rulebook: This includes one scenario, "Bad Eggs in the Big City," as also supplied to Kickstarter backers in PDF format. This one has the distinct virtue, from the point of view of GMs looking to borrow and adapt ideas, of flexibility; the PCs are simply a bunch of people who are roped in by the Patrician to do a job for him, which is of course quite Discworld-ish and generally easy enough to work with. Still, some pre-existing characters (and players) will be better suited to this job - basically a string of troubleshooting tasks, mostly requiring social skills - than others. As the problems are only linked by the fact that they're obstacles in the way of the PCs getting different parts of their job done, the scenario doesn't have a strong core plot, though it has plenty of Discworld flavour. The preparation required to run it under the DRPG rules should be reasonably straightforward.

The Night Before Hogswatch includes the scenario "Hogswatch at Snyde Manor," a standalone scenario set during the events of the novel Hogfather, with pregenerated characters who are all, broadly speaking, anthropomorphic personifications or similar (except that many of them aren't actually anthropomorphic, but never mind, we know what they mean). It's even more flagrantly a one-shot game than most DAiAM scenarios, and the booklet advises that festive scenarios (i.e. one-shots run around Christmastime) should be especially silly. Hence, this one is highly unlikely to fit into an existing campaign (though I'm slightly tempted to sit down one day and stat all of the pregens up under the DRPG rules, just to show that it's possible). The scenario itself is yet again a bunch of scenes and problems linked by an overall objective, rather than a linear plot, though there's actually plenty of opportunity for interactions between the various sub-plots.

This third and final part of these notes will cover Tales from the Big Wahoonie and Ankh-Morpork Through the Ages.

Using Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork as a Resource for the Discworld RPG (pt. 1)

I've always tried to tell people that, as the (original) Discworld Roleplaying Game, hereafter "DRPG", is all about roleplaying on the Discworld as published, any canonical(-or-thereabouts) published material relating to the Disc can serve as source material for the game. So, obviously, that principle must apply to the new Discworld: Adventures in Ank-Morpork RPG, hereafter "DAiAM". (And, likewise,  the older RPG can serve as source material for the new one; see my post on Adapting my own Discworld Roleplaying Game Scenarios.) Having now looked through the new game, I'll say that it absolutely does. How much use it is will be determined by individual GMs and the nature of their campaigns.

Okay, to start with - much of DAiAM consists of basic introductory material about the Disc and its inhabitants. This is absolutely not a criticism; the same would go for any half-decent published Discworld roleplaying game, and certainly goes for my own - anything else would be crazy. However, that means that anyone who's happy with the DRPG and on a budget may wish to think about their priorities before buying the new game. You won't get a huge amount that isn't in the DRPG or the Discworld Companion (let alone, of course, the novels); it does go into quite a bit of detail on Ankh-Morpork, but I think even that mostly comes from the street map and The Compleat Ankh-Morpork. Still, it's nicely presented and amply illustrated with colour Paul Kidby art (if not very many new images that I can see), and anyway, well, Discworld completists will be completist.

Which said, I think that the main reasons to buy the new game and its supplements, from a DRPG GM's point of view will be the scenarios, and also some random scenery and item generation rules (basically numbered tables of one-line ideas or descriptions). This is good - new sources of scenario ideas are always welcome, especially to GMs who find themselves scrabbling on the edge of burnout - but quite how usable these scenarios will be will likely vary a lot from GM to GM.

(From a player's point of view, an additional use for the new game would be as a source of prompts when stuck for ideas in character generation. DAiAM character generation basically involves generating and then answering a bunch of questions about the character's past, which can be a good approach when coming up with a new character in any system. DAiAM just has tables of ideas to roll dice against.)

The point being that the Discworld is a world, which means that there are countless locations and narrative niches that could be used in campaigns - along with enough blank spots on the map and unexploited plot possibilities that enterprising GMs can jump into. I emphasised this in the DRPG, expending a few pages on the Brown Islands (barely mentioned in the books) as a campaign location, and a few more on other possibilities, from Klatch to Fourecks. As the title suggests, DAiAM focuses much more specifically on Ankh-Morpork ("Lancre and Uberwald" will be covered in a whole new game in the near future), but even there, it points to a whole range of game possibilities, working for various groups such as the various guilds or the Watch, or playing supernatural beings. That, by the way, is scenario possibilities, not campaign possibilities; DAiAM is open about its intention to support one-off games and scenarios rather than continuing campaigns.

This vastness of possibilities is a wonderful thing about the Disc as a game world, but makes the idea of using any published Discworld scenarios for any system in an on-going campaign a little tricky. With the best will in the world, the chances of any given published scenario fitting into any given campaign are going to be a little slim. At a guess, the single most likely campaign framework to show up might be an Ankh-Mopork City Watch game, which fits with some of the DAiAM sample scenarios, but I wouldn't bet on even that being especially common.

But enough negativity; the real question here must be "How easy is it to convert DAiAM scenarios to the DRPG in some form?" And the answer is "Quite easy, really", but as in all RPG system conversions, there'll be some work involved. Still, the DAiAM system means that there won't be an excessive amount of number-crunching - because DAiAM barely counts as a system at all, to cranky old-school tabletop roleplayers like me. Characters, both PCs and NPCs, are defined by a short list of descriptive phrases, and that's it. To "convert" them to the DRPG, all you can do is take that brief description and any accompanying notes, and, umm, create a DRPG character from scratch that fits that description, in whatever level of detail is useful. Scenarios then consist of a bunch of objectives for PCs and scene descriptions, and it's up to the GM and players to make things happen within that framework. Given that (a) DAiAM characters are defined entirely by their personal foibles, and (b) the resolution mechanic is quite heavy on randomness and seems actively designed to lead to a lot of chaos, I suspect that a lot of scenarios run under those rules will go way off the rails very quickly, and that this is pretty much intentional. Different groups will probably have different opinions about this.

But still, these scenarios can certainly be run using the DRPG. There's nothing wrong with the idea that a GM should just start with a loose framework and improvise a lot as required, and the GURPS rules mechanics permit that; the GM just has to be ready to invent a few appropriate numbers (NPC skill levels and stats, difficulty penalties, and so forth) when required. To get technical for a moment, it might be worth pinching the "Basic Abstract Difficulty" rule from GURPS Action; the process of subtly choreographing an action movie scene isn't that different to that of running a comedy scene, after all.

Which I think covers the theory; my next post runs through some of the DAiAM scenarios published to date in terms of their possible usefulness to a DRPG GM.

Adapting my Discworld Roleplaying Game Scenarios to Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork

As the author of the original Discworld Roleplaying Game, I have of course picked up the new Discworld: Adventures in Ank-Morpork, as a matter of professional curiosity. And, having got it, I decided to convert the demo scenarios that I've previously created for my game to the new model, just to see how they look. (Which is probably "a bit weird", given the new game's fixation on improvisational roleplaying over everything else, but whatever.) I'm still working on this, but I've now made a couple publicly available; the curious should go to my scenarios page and scroll down to the bottom.