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This weekend, I went to my favorite localish game convention, Strategicon, and ran the new Discworld TTRPG, Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. I ran 3 sessions– two were scheduled, and the third was a pickup game at Games on Demand, due to having to turn away a number of waitlisted players from my scheduled games.
I ran this adventure, which is from the “Ankh-Morpork Through the Ages” book, twice. Once on Saturday, during my scheduled time slot of 9 AM, and then again on Sunday night due to demand. Both sessions went pretty well, with only a few hiccups that were mostly due to table dynamics.
Unlike many other organizations and adventures, this one doesn’t come with a set of pre-generated characters. Instead, GMs are encouraged to use characters from a variety of other organizations and even adventures.
I chose instead to create my own pre-gens for this one. Partly, that’s because I have played in an adventure where everyone is from different organizations. And partly it’s because I wanted to practice my Discworld character creation skills.
See, I’ve also run Discworld with a group that had characters they were bringing in from a previous campaign. I didn’t spend a lot of time looking too closely at their character sheets before play, and this was a mistake. I learned from that experience a few things about making Discworld characters;
- They need to be concise. 5-7 words for a trait is good. I don’t actually want a paragraph for background or description, which is a common trait of many of the published pre-gens. The less the better.
Why: Traits are essentially your skills and abilities and even attributes in Discworld. If it’s on your character sheet, you can use it to justify why you’re good at something. The more verbiage, the more you can claim to be an expert at something. And being super good at something means you’re less likely to fail. Which is, frankly, kind of boring. Failure is fun in Discworld– it’s how the story moves forward.
But also: Players are encouraged to use wordplay and puns to make their traits fit into a particular task or test. If it’s too wordy, they aren’t challenged to twist the meaning until it fits. So we won’t get the beautiful moments where someone turns their loner character’s trait of “No strings attached” into an ability to escape bonds more easily. - They need to have the potential for multiple meanings. See above for the wordplay. If the phrases are too literal, it stifles that creativity.
Anyway, I came up with six PCs who made pretty good cultists. The only thing I would change is that I made one of them a “champion cheese jouster,” which is a nod to another Discworld adventure, Up in Smoke, from the published quickstart. Unfortunately, that trait, along with the presence of a cheesemonger NPC, meant that the party focused far too much on the role of cheese.
When I make revisions to these characters, I don’t think I’ll take away the cheese element– we also had a character who wanted some rats, so there was good synergy there. I’ll simply add something to the other characters to tie them into the other locations in Sator Square– perhaps give the bard or the troll more of an interest in travel (“A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss” for the troll perhaps?)
If you are prepping for this adventure, please feel free to use my pre-generated characters if you find them useful. You’ll need to add your own character art, as I don’t have permission for the art I used at the table during my games.
You can also use my Sator Square map. You don’t need a map for this adventure, but it definitely helped my players have a visual reminder of some key locations they might want to visit.
