It’s hard to get Terry Pratchett adaptations right. Imagine reading a Discworld book and trying to make it a film or TV series, for instance. Many have, andmany have failed. If I were tasked with such a monumental opportunity, I’d start with a story. Pick an arc: probably the City Watch despite the numerous poor adaptations in existence already, but shoutouts to Mort, the Witches novels, and even the Industrial Revolution series could work well. Now you’ve got your characters.
Translating Pratchett’s stories isn’t any more difficult than adapting any other novel. Transferring his unique style to another medium, however, presents numerous challenges. Pratchett thrived on paper. His funniest jokes were often told in footnotes, his puns and wordplay were so clever that you’d see a whole joke you missed completely on your third or fourth read of any given novel. He was a wordsmith in ways that few authors are, even the greats. His plots may translate to other media, but his voice is almost impossible to replicate.
That’s why his work would excel as a tabletop RPG. While the game would be able to use Pratchett’s vivid settings and iconic characters, it wouldn’t need to worry about that acerbic humour. That could be replicated in rulebooks and the like, but for the most part it would come from the players, who can all inject a bit of what made Pratchett special to them.
That’s what Modiphius is hoping, at least. The publisher of many adapted board games and TTRPGs including Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Star Trek, Modiphius has secured the rights to make board games and TTRPGs from Terry Pratchett’s works. The specific plans are tight under wraps for the time being, but the publisher did say that the TTRPG would be focused “around the city of Ankh-Morpork and the wider Disc” and likely launch on Kickstarter at the end of the year.
“Terry had a lifelong affection with roleplaying games,” says Pratchett’s assistant, business manager, and lifelong friend Rob Wilkins, “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. We are delighted to be partnering with Modiphius. We love their work and we love their ethos and we entirely trust them to get things right.”
If the Wilkins endorsement wasn’t enough to entice you into the first Discworld RPG since 1998 (when one Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy andGames Workshopfame created a game in the setting), then Modiphius is sending out asurvey for Discworld fans, to ask what they want from an RPG in the setting.
As I mentioned above, I think a TTRPG is the perfect vehicle for Discworld adaptations. The screen just can’t grasp the annotated, referenced style of Pratchett’s writing even if it gets his humour – which it often doesn’t. People, and therefore players, on the other hand, do. Put the emphasis on us to make Ankh-Morpork come alive, and we’ll rise to the challenge as a legion of players raised in those dingy streets.
An Ankh-Morpork TTRPG could become a funnier reinvention ofMordheim, if we play our cards right.
With excellent writers and game designers who have worked on previous projects and a company with a good track record on Kickstarter, my hopes are higher for this adaptation than any other before. Think of the rules for the Unseen University, think of the miniatures for the Watch, think of the chaos that we can steward through Ankh-Morpork’s wonderfully realised streets. After years of poor interpretations of Pratchett’s work, I’m crossing my fingers that Modiphius gets this one right.
