Notes Toward a Steampunk Discworld Game

[Phil Masters]

For personal reasons, I decided that I can only run one game session at UK Games Expo this year, and circumstances meant it had to be a new one. So I was tossing up between my two main GURPS projects of recent years -- the Discworld RPG and Steampunk -- when it occurred to me that I might as well not bother choosing. After all, the Disc was getting pretty much steampunk by the time of the last novel, so why not project that on a bit?

So that's what I've said I'm going to do. And I'm dropping my general thinking about the setting here, for commentary and borrowing.

Note that this isn't intended to be an unauthorised continuation of Terry Pratchett's great work, let alone a "logical" projection of the setting history he described. It's just an excuse to use all the tasty secondary setting material -- the maps, the place names, the assorted races, the Discworld RPG -- for a steampunk game.

I decided to project things on by at least fifty years, and maybe a hundred, mostly so I could kill off pretty well all the characters from the books, and drop in as much TL6+ technology as took my fancy. Actually, I'm labelling the setting as TL(5+1), heading into TL(5+2), but it's the Discworld; the Rule of Cool applies above all. If I want to use anything from any GURPS steampunk book, as-yet-published or not (bwah hah hah), I will. (Narrativium even ensures that airships can work!) To get the proper late-Victorian feel, I think I need to continue the Rise of the Middle Classes, as seen in the novels. To make this a useful game system, well, some things have to go wrong.

Ankh-Morpork

The problem with, and for, Lord Havelock Vetinari was that he was an impossible act to follow. He knew that he was mortal, and did his best to train up successors who could keep his beloved, despised city safe, but by the end, he had to accept that none of them were him. Some historians wonder why he didn't seek to become a vampire -- he had contacts, and vampires were quite well tolerated in the city by the end of his life -- but those who have gained some access to his private writings (still some of the city's most closely-guarded secrets) say that he didn't think that his own essential nature would survive the transformation.

At least, that's their best guess. Based on what they've been permitted to read, under a security regime designed by Lord Vetinari.

Anyway, Vetinari actually spent most of the last ten years of his life rebuilding Ankh-Morpork's political system from the ground up, without too many people noticing. When he actually died (allegedly?), a new Patrician was elected, in the old style, and was immediately puzzled to discover that he was only slightly more than a figurehead. The old council of guilds had mutated into a whole hierarchy of councils, with a First Council on top (probably), all selected by a quasi-democratic system that would make Renaissance Venice look simple. Needless to say, being a Vetinari design, it all works, well enough that nobody much wants to knock it down, but not so well as to leave any career politicians with dangerous amounts of time on their hands.

And so Ankh-Morpork continues to dominate the Sto Plains, helped by the fact that it is the centre of modern steam and telegraphic technology (local merchants were quick to jump on board when the electric telegraph was invented). Whether the First Council was entirely wise to release some of Leonard of Quirm's drawings from the deep archives remains controversial, but Ankh-Morpork also dominates in the military sphere these days as a direct result.

But it has rivals, there and elsewhere, also as a direct result. And some of them are hungry, whereas Ankh-Morpork is fat and complacent, at least according to foreign political leaders...

(Basically, Ankh-Morpork's resemblance to Victorian London gets dialled up a couple more notches in this treatment, with added steam-tech. PCs will likely come from there and/or work for the City. The Undertaking has provided the place with an underground railway, "muckbreaker" steamboats fitted with armoured bows ply the Ankh, and steam carriages run people over in the streets.)

Next post; some rival powers.