I've started running a game of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork at my local ttrpg club, the Milton Keynes Roleplaying Group, after successfully pitching to enough players who wanted to take part. Here's the pitch that got them hooked:
Existing in a previously unknown back street of infamous Ankh-Morpork, The Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine offers hope to those whose ailments respond to neither traditional nor modern methods. The staff* here will do whatever it takes to treat your condition, whether that's praying to the Small Gods for an intercession on your behalf or replacing the inefficient organs of your body with exciting new versions of their own design! Bring us your tired, your sick, your broken, but above all, bring us your money.
Alternative Medicine is a game set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, using the quickstart version of the rules for Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork from Modiphius. This is a fully trait based system, with characters defined entirely by short, descriptive phrases about their backgrounds, skills, interests and baggage: there are no numbers involved at all! There are still dice though, with players rolling a d4, d6, d10 or d12 against the GM, who always rolls, um, you know, the other dice.
PCs will be practitioners or consultants in unorthodox areas of biology & medicine, such as these suggested starting points:
- A Witch or other practitioner of headology
- An Igor, skilled at all kinds of organ transplants
- A Priest capable of praying illness away
- An Undead, with experience of the other side
- An Assassin, consultant on poisons and "accidents"
- A Troll, providing a very different perspective
All is not well in Ankh-Morpork, which is business as usual for the city and a great opportunity for you, but the forces of destiny and coincidence are weaving their threads, and the Clinic is caught right in the middle of the closing web. You all have your parts to play, along with a guild of snake-oil salespeople, a wizard with a strange idea about ideas, an embittered toymaker and rumours of the Patrician's imminent retirement.
*Legal advice from the Guild of Lawyers requires the Clinic to inform all prospective clients that our staff have not earned the titles of 'Doctor', 'Nurse', 'Medic', 'Paramedic', 'First Aider', 'Coroner', 'Responsible Adult' or 'Gravedigger'
Last night saw the first session of the game take place, which consisted of a chunk of character creation and then a lot of absurd running around after patients of the clinic. The breakdown of the player-characters is:
- Celia Woodruff, a mycelial witch who believes that mushrooms are the answer to most of life's problems, ignoring the fact that they also create many of those problems. Celia is her own guinea pig for testing new treatments and she is very diligent about trying out the mushrooms on herself. When she is in contact with reality, she takes care of her pet rat Mossy, who acquired a magnificent green coat when he fell into the River Ankh and bounced.
- Count Holloway Harris, an irritatingly sane scientist from Uberwald, who just has no luck with the typical accoutrements of his profession. Like most Uberwaldean scientists, he just makes it all up as he goes along, but always attracts the wrong type of weather for his experiments: he needs a nice fresh storm, he gets a lovely day for a picnic in the park.
- Analogue Cockaday, a rural domestic goddess (not literally) whose life was changed forever when she was kicked in the head by one of her pigs and her whole outlook was changed overnight. Converting her farm & family to new vegan principles has not been easy for her, but she has come to Ankh-Morpork to share her passion for retrophrenology* with a wider audience.
- Thackeray Ambrosius, self-proclaimed opulentologist, he takes money from the rich, thus relieving them of the terrible burden of having more money than him. He might get around to sharing the wealth with the poor someday. We also learned that one of his ex-clients almost put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild, but dire finances limited this to a price on his foot.
- Toby Determined, born nine months prior to a night of passion between a couple of reannual crop farmers, most of his life is lived in the wrong order as he feels the effects of things before their causes. As a medical practicioner, he finds conditions that match the symptoms his patients report, exposes them to the cause of the condition and then cures them of that.
*Analogue hits people on the head with variously sized hammers in order to give them those personality-defining lumps & bumps that contribute to the melting pot of Ankh-Morpork!
The focus of the first episode was Dydon Harlyn, a successful architect with the contract to redevelop the Dragon's Landing site, who was plagued with mysterious physical injuries, such as his arm suddenly twisting and breaking in front of witnesses at the clinic. A lackadaisical investigation eventually revealed that his teenage daughter had made dolls using her father's old wig and given them out to her school chums, inadvertently creating a whole set of voodoo dolls! The team gathered all the dolls and safely neutralised them, but some danglng plot threads remain, that will be revisited over the course of the campaign:- Celia, an experienced witch, observed that the accidental creation of voodoo dolls isn't how witchcraft works, leaving her perplexed over how this happened.
- Toby paid off Dr. Frank Winkie, a representative of the newly founded Guild of Licensed Medical Practitioners, but the clinic is now expected to pay another AM$50,000 every month or face closure!
- Finally, Cosine Cockaday, a relative of Analogue who she had met that day at a protest over the Dragon's Landing redevelopment project, was seen late at night, drinking while brooding over the wasteland where his home once stood. His fire was blown out by a mysterious gust of wind and the last we saw of him was as he was engulfed in the shadow of a dragon's wing!
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