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.