Bryce Johnston begins our video call by showing me his armful of Discworld tattoos. He declines to show me the one on his chest, considering we were in a professional setting, but his love of Terry Pratchett’s world is instantly clear. His colleague, Andrew Douthwaite, is less inked, but equally passionate about all things that occur 🍸on A'Tuin’s leathery bac✤k.

The pair are writing and spearheading 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, a new Discworld TTRPG by Modiphius, with Johnston acting as editor and Douthwaite lead designer. It’s immediately obvious that this is a dream ꦫcome ✃true for the pair.

“I’ve loved this since I was like 13 years old,” Johnston tells me over video call. “That's 20 years of my life. There are millions of people out there who, in less than a day, are going to be reading jokes that I wrote an🌺d comparing them to Pratchett, so I am shaking over here.”

Luckily, the jokes land. For a piece of work created nearly a decade after the legendary fantasy author’s death, it has a remarkably Pratchettian, Discworld𒀰ish feel. From the fourt🎃h wall breaking footnotes to the winding tangents and, of course, wonderful wordplay, it feels like it is drawn from the very same fabric as the novels.

But it’s not just the writing that feels Discworldian. The RPG itself is a game of trying to be as outlandish as possible, reconciling whatever ridicu♐lous plan forms in between your ears with how good your character is at pulling it off. Put simply, if you can persuade your GM that your character is capable of melting through a solid stone wall to escape a group of bandits, there’s a higher chance that you’ll be able to do it. Adventures in Ankh-Morpork is, very appropriately considering its setting, a game of blagging.

“Boil🍬ing people down to numbers is something Pratchett would have hated.” - Bryce Johnston

To do this, Modiphius has moved away from its traditional 2D20 approach to its games, and Adventures in Ankh-Morpork instead opts for using a complete set of polyhedral dic🍸e. “We needed to create a system that lets the stories come first and the system sort of fade into the background,” Douthwaite tells me by way of explanation. Adventures in Ankh-Morpork grants each player a D4, D6, D10, and D12. The GM uses the D8, known as the Narrativium die. Depending on a character’s traits, and how good the player is at explaining why the aforementioned trait is appropriate for whatever action they’ve concocted, the GM decides which of their dice the player will roll to try to beat the Narrativium die.

There’s two things that stand out to me from reading the that Modiphius has released as a taster for the ful🥃l TTRPG, which launches on Kickstarter later this month. The first is that combat doesn’t have bespoke r🗹ules, it’s explained away and blagged like any other roll. This was intentional, of course, and Johnston explains why.

“The more [space] you devote in a rulebook t🍃o a particular thing, the more you are indicating to your players that that's the thing you should be doing,” he says. “So if we devoted an e🦩ntire chapter to combat that would be telling players that they should be solving their problems with combat.”

The pair allude to Dungeons & Dragons, and which parts of sessions players find the most memorable. The memorable moments are having a laugh with friends, the extreme roleplaying, the fun comes from the stuff that happens betwee🤡n the big fights. Other than one particular incident involving a giant, an exploding shield, and an oversized plesiosaur, I’m inclined to agree.

However, the decision to gloss over combat by talking your fights away also comes from Pratchett himself. “Looking at the Discworld novels,” Douthwaite explains, “even the ones that, if they were written by another author could be incredibly combat and bloody and all of these things –▨ Jingo is a war and Night Watch is a revolution – but they're not. If there is combat, even in other ones that aren't focused on combat like the Carrot’s bar fight in Guards! Guards! you don't see it. It's all from the outside, it's just implied yꦍou hear what sounds like someone hitting a gong a few times and making the joke about the Protective. It's like it's always there as a background, it's never there as the focus.”

The second thing that stands out to me in the Quickstart rules is the character’s stats or, more accurately, the lack of them. Instead of numbers to represent Carrot’s dexterity or Vimes’ stubbornness, each character has a list of attributes or traits. It’s your job as the player to shape each trait to your will, sculpting it like clay inܫ order to persuade your GM that you can use a better die than the D4 you definitely deserve.

“The lack of stats is very deliberate as well,” Johnston explains. “Because in all of Pratchett's writing, people 🔴are people. In real life people are a collection of traits, right? It's all word-based, it's all personality based.”

He also thinks that “boiling people down to numbers is something Pratchett would have hated,” an♋d I’♛m inclined to agree. Besides, it’s going to be far more fun trying to explain how Constable Misbegot & Ampersands’ quirk that makes them “beloved by animals despite their best efforts” can help you out of a sticky situation than just rolling a D20 for animal handling.

Everything about Adventures in Ankh-Morpork feels Discworld. From the five premade characters in the Quickstart rules, to the scenarios they find themselves in, it’s all reminiscent of the world that Pratchett created🅠. With clever mechanics that put emphasis on player ingenuit🔥y to inject more of that Pratchettian humour, the game really feels like the perfect storm.

Allegedly the whole game stemmed from Modiphius CEO Chris Birch meeting Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett’s former assistant and one of the c𒉰urators of the Pratchett estate, at an event, and pitching him an RPG. The two got on well, and the rest is history. The team checked in with Wilkins on a “semi-regular” basis, every couple of weeks, but due to the fact he was on board with the core concept, they never really disagღreed on any of the decisions being made. Their work together came to a head when Douthwaite ran a game of Adventures in Ankh-Morpork for Wilkins.

“Recently we had the Pratchett estate come up and I ran the Quickstart adventure forRob ꦓWilkins and his son,” he explains. “Running it was fine once I got into the swing of it, it was just running another game. And then Danny [Lade] the project manager came up to me afterwards [and asked], ‘So, how was it running for Pratchett's old assistant?’ I was like, ‘I'm glad you said this after, I would have been bricking it before!’”

The whole project h💜as been a dream come true for the pair of Pratchett superfans, and they’re keeping their fingers crossed that the Kickstarter goes well so they can dip back into Discworld. “After this RPG, we can still do a lot more,” Johnston says. “It just really depends how well this one goes, as far as I'm aware. We’re noꦜt a part of the big business, the grown-up decisions – we work for a living.” He laughs. “I think there is space, from what I’ve heard, to do more stuff if this goes well.”

If you’ve dipped your toes into the slightly spongy water of the Ankh’s first TTRPG in nearly 30 years via the Quickstart campaign and want more, well, you know what to do. It’s time to persuade your partဣner, parents, or anthropomorphic tea chest that this is the most important RPG of your life, that it aligns perfectly with the core traits of your very being, and then roll a D12 against their Narrativium die to see if you can head to the Kickstarter page.