The Discworld Roleplaying Game (now available in PDF)

[PK]

There are on Discworld
All things weird and wonderful.
Sir Terry made them all.

— Dr. Rod Pitcher

There are countless stories to be told on the Disc, from urban intrigue in Ankh-Morpork to caravan trading in EcksEcksEcksEcks, and the Discworld Roleplaying Game is your guide to creating your own. Welcome to a world where humor and the narrative power of story are laws every bit as important as those of physics -- a world which satirizes everything from classic fantasy to modern life.

As our largest book to date, the Discworld Roleplaying Game includes everything you need to get started, even a customized distillation of the GURPS rules! Be human or choose from over a dozen races. Create (relatively) advanced technology, rely upon the luck of the Lady, or perform impossible "mad medicine" surgeries. Command the forces of magic, with rules for playing a wizard, witch, or one of the less-known practitioners such as a demonologist, hedge mage, or even a sourcerer. The self-contained, freeform magic system included within has everything you need to get started.

(But don't just listen to me -- see what author Phil Masters has to say later in this thread.)

Whether you're a long-time fan of Sir Terry's work, or completely new to the world of the Disc, the Discworld Roleplaying Game is here to show you this amazing world and get you started on an equally amazing game.

—

Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-2500
Preview PDF: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG31-2500_preview.pdf

[bert]

I own the hardcover, and think this is an fantastic RPG product. If you don't have it, Get it!

On a related side note, when clicking the "Powered by GURPS" link on http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/Discworld/, you get to a page saying "GURPS 3rd Ed" on the top, but with a mix of 3e and 4e products. That feels a bit odd, I think the products deserve a revised page.

[Ronnke]

Absolutely fantastic! :)

[johndallman]

Excellent! Bought immediately.

[evileeyore]

A must buy!

[Gollum]

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank you very much for that amazing piece of news.

[Phil Masters]

Many thanks for all the positive responses so far.

Like all GURPS adaptation books, this one is aimed at (a) fans of GURPS who might be interested in the setting, and (b) fans of the setting who might be interested in GURPS. I assume that people who haven't bought the book yet but who are reading this thread are mostly potential members of the first category. So I guess a big question here is what GURPS fans might get from this book.

The best answer (apart from, I may hope, "a quick education in the weird charms of the Discworld as a story setting") is probably "an extensive worked example of how to fit the GURPS rules to a specific world" -- very specifically, a somewhat unusual but not totally out-there fantasy setting. This is something I was able to do in this edition that wasn't part of the process for the first edition; a full integration of the rules to the Disc, applying the lessons I learned working on Hellboy, Vorkosigan, and Thaumatology.

Which meant that I got to dump some stuff. For example, Control Ratings and Legality Classes were part of some early versions of the text, before I realised that they just don't work in a fantasy-quasi-medieval setting where what one can get away with is so often a function of social position, chutzpah, and circumstance. Unaging and Longevity were dumped because, well, who really cares about them in this sort of freewheeling game? Though they came back as a perk, because the answer to that question might include Cohen the Barbarian and Granny Weatherwax, and I don't care to argue with them. Weapon stats for artillery lasted longer, but then I found that I had a space problem, and I suddenly realised that, most of the time, those things are plot devices, not personal equipment. How much damage do they do? Enough.

And, of course, I got to add one biggie (alongside the much-loved but relatively compact Shouting at Foreigners skill); the new magic system. Well, not very new; it came out of some work I did on Thaumatology, which in turn drew on some Third Edition books and so forth. Hardcore Discworld fans may be bemused that I invented a system that doesn't reference the novels so much as it does a throwaway gag in The Discworld Companion, but the fact is that the novels don't have a coherent magic system. (Well, I prefer to think that they offer incidental partial glimpses of a grand and hideously complex topic that nobody really understands, even in the setting.) So I came up with something that I think fits, plays fairly fast, and is adequately balanced and amusing. I've even heard mutters about people adopting it as their default GURPS magic system, in place of the usual spells-as-skills mechanic; I'm not sure how that'll work for them, but I'd be fascinated to hear.

Which just leaves me having to thank Paul Kidby and Sean Murray for the art, which shows me what things I wrote about actually look like, and Sean for the editing. Oh, and everyone who buys it and says nice things about it, again, without whom the whole exercise would feel really empty.

[Refplace]

I think it was much better done then the first one or any of the other Powered by GURPS offerings I have bought.
I liked the skill clusters for example.
And the dueling system for magic is the best I have seen for GURPS.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I think it was much better done then the first one or any of the other Powered by GURPS offerings I have bought.

Thanks. I like to think that we did a decent job of integrating the games rules into the Hellboy text, back in the noughties, which in fact was what made me think "Hey, we could do a Discworld second edition better!" -- but it's a non- trivial task to write the rules into the text rather than appending them.

To be truthful, the first edition of Discworld was written initially as a standard GURPS supplement of the time; assume that the reader has the Basic Set, write this as an add-on. I always wished that I'd known that Lite was going to be tagged on the end, so I could have tweaked things accordingly, but that was a late decision. This time round, I was able to get it right.

[Paulon]

I have to admit I didn't read all the way through the physical book in detail. It was just too big, physically speaking, to be easy to read through for me. I'm now going back and enjoying all the little details you worked in that I originally skipped or skimmed over in the rules due to book weight.
Being able to take it to work to read on breaks is going to help with that too.