Terry Pratchett’s hilarious Discworld series has been a fantasy mainstay in books, movies, and television for decades, even after the author’s death in 2015. But for something that’s so important to a popular genre, it’s odd that there haven’t been many attempts to adapt it into a role-playing game, especially given its wealth of characters, species, settings, and deep satire.
Modiphius Entertainment, publisher of licensed tabletop titles such as Dune: Adventures in the Imperium, announced on Thursday that it has officially licensed Discworld for a series of board games, along with a tabletop RPG called Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. The latter will be the subject of a Kickstarter campaign, expected to launch later in 2024.
Image: Modiphius Entertainment
“Terry had a lifelong affection with roleplaying games and it’s an entirely logical path along which you can follow his career from Dungeon Master to him becoming one of our most celebrated and beloved fantasy authors of all time,” said Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant, in a press release on behalf of the author’s estate. “We are delighted to be partnering with Modiphius […] we entirely trust them to get things right.”
No other details have been announced on the RPG, including what kind of rules it might use, but we can expect more details when the Kickstarter campaign launches.
The last official Discworld RPG was released in 1998 by Steve Jackson Games, with a GURPS-based rulebook written in part by Pratchett himself, along with Phil Masters, who has contributed to White Wolf games and worked on various GURPS supplements. A sequel, GURPS Discworld Also, was published in 2001. There have also been a few board games, including 2011’s Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, where players have to meet a set of conditions set by the personality they chose, then play cards to progress throughout the city.
Image: Steve Jackson Games
The first game’s fourth edition, published in 2016, is still available at Warehouse 23, Amazon, and DriveThruRPG in softcover or as a PDF. While you can get the hardcover edition at retailers like Noble Knight Games, it’ll cost you around $225. According to Steve Jackson Games, the hardcover is out of print, so it could make for a nice collector’s item.
Discworld adaptations have been hit-or-miss in terms of quality and fan response. There have been several BBC radio adaptations, but some of the movie and TV versions of Pratchett novels haven’t been well received. One of the most recent was 2021’s The Watch , a BBC TV series that took the City Watch from books like Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms as inspiration, but deviated significantly from the source material.
Modiphius has a history of working on faithful third-party adaptations, including the Fallout video game franchise in Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and Fallout: Factions, and the Homeworld RTS games with Homeworld: Revelations. Its latest release was Dune: Fall of Imperium, an expansion for Adventures in Imperium that puts you right in the middle of the fall of the House of Atreides. The publisher has also released its own original games, including Achtung! Cthulhu. Many of its past products have remained faithful to the properties they’re based on, so we can probably expect the games to use a lot from the Discworld books.
However, if you want to provide feedback for the publisher and make sure your favorite characters are included in the release, you can fill out this survey.
Prices taken at time of publishing.
While it was first published in 1998, you can still get a version of the Discworld GURPS RPG as a PDF or softcover. The hardcover edition is available, but it’ll put a strain on your wallet.
Discworld – Ankh-Morpork board game
Prices taken at time of publishing.
This board game came out over a decade ago, so it’s quite expensive if you want to buy a copy now. For $300, you can get a fun experience wherein you and your friends take on a personality from the Discworld universe and complete goals to win.