Exploring the Witchy Side of Terry Pratchett's Discworld in the Lancre and Uberwald Expansion

Today we’re returning to Discworld. Originally launching with a successful Kickstarter in 2024, the Modiphius team released its digest version of the game at GenCon earlier this year. The game urged tables to use bluffing, humor, and comedy to solve their problems, encouraging cleverness in the process.

Now the team is expanding beyond the urban insanity of Ankh Morpork to the rural and magical regions of Lancre, Überwald, and the Chalk in its latest crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound. The book adds witches, vampires, and all sorts of other species from Terry Pratchett’s fantasy world to your table.

It’s both an expansion to the original game and its urban environment and a standalone game for those new to the series.

TTRPG Insider spoke with Modiphius line editor Bryce Johnston and editor Andy Douthwaite via an email interview about the game, what it adds to the growing series, and more.

How does Adventures in Lancre and Überwald addition compare to the original Ankh-Morpork book? What does it add?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: There are a few key things we’ve added in this one compared to Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. Firstly, there are a lot more playable species: vampires, werewolves, and Nac Mac Feegles, to name a few. Obviously, there’s also quite a lot in there about witches, and you can play a wide variety of witchy characters with the new rules we’ve written here. Other than that, we’ve really taken this as an opportunity to go over the rules from AiA-M (what a fun and not-awful-looking acronym) and iterate on them, workshop them, and streamline them based on the experience we’ve gained over the last few years of working and playing with the system. You could view this as a sort of 1.5 if you squint, there’s a lot of little quality of life changes all over the place that really improve the experience. We learned a lot in the process of writing AiA-M and we put all of that experience to good use in making AiLaÜ even better!*

*Andy would like it, in writing, that he does not approve of these acronyms, and he has in fact tried to delete them from this paragraph several times. Fortunately I’m the editor so GIR—UYA**

**Get It Right —in’ Up Ye, Andy.

Considering the game's looser approach to rules, how will the additions of the more magically oriented character types change the player experience?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: It won’t! You could be wizards before, and in fact, you can still be wizards. But now you can also be witches too. Thank gods for equal rites.

Why make Lancre and Überwald a standalone addition? Will this be a normal approach?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: Because Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops are quite far apart and very distinct places. One is quintessentially urban, and the other is quintessentially rural. This fundamental difference affects the stories you’ll want to tell, the aspects of each setting you'll want to focus on, and the sorts of characters you’ll both play as and run into. The two places, while they do have overlapping themes, often explore different parts of Pratchettian thought. Also, quite frankly, there’s more than enough in the Ramtops to fill an entire crowdfunder’s worth of stuff by itself. 

The other part of it is that we wanted someone to be able to back one crowdfunder and get all the core rules, everything essential for play, rather than make people have to pick up lots of different things all over the place to feel like they’ve gotten the complete experience.  

This is most likely the approach we’ll take going forward, yes. 

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Witchcraft and Magic in the Land of Pratchett

How does the game capture Pratchett's distinct addition of magic to the mechanics, and how do those additions or modifications affect the standard Discworld rules?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: Because of the Tiffany and Witches novels, we actually know a lot more about how witch magic works, even though wizard magic is supposed to be more complex and formalized. So we’re in this strange place where we know the rules and mechanics of the theoretically less mechanized form of magic much better than we know the rules and mechanics of the theoretically more formalized rulesy magic. 

As a result, we built a more focused magic system than the one found in Adventure in Ankh-Morpork.* The main difference this time around is that we have given witches specific powers, as opposed to the ability to freely bugger about with the fabric of reality that wizards have. The reasoning behind this is that witches don’t really bugger about with the fabric of reality; in fact, the best of them don’t do any magic at all unless they really have to. 

The witches of Discworld change the world in small ways. Mostly. Until they have to change the world in large ways, which they are more than capable of. They just know better than to do it, just 'cause you want your pipe lit and you can’t be bothered to stand up. Each has their own focus, as expanded on quite extensively in the Tiffany Aching books. We meet pig witches, edge witches, fairy godmothers, and a whole host of other kinds of witches across the course of the novels, and we wanted players to be able to build whichever witch their heart desired. 

Returning to the question, aside from the tweaks we’ve made to the core system, there are no “new” mechanics. Witch magic, just like wizard magic, uses a character's Luck, since we all know that doing too much magic is an excellent way to push your luck. This time around we’ve just added in a few more guidelines for how that magic works and written some more formalized descriptions of the various different types of witches.

What other regions are being considered for expansion books? What are other plans for content support going forward?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: The Discworld is a big place. Many places within it feature interesting characters who could be cool to write about. This is a very passive way of saying ‘We don’t know if we’re allowed to say anything, so we’re going to waffle a bit’

Are there any particular bits of lore or easter eggs that Pratchett fans may find notably exciting in this release?

Bryce Johnston and Andy Douthwaite: I mean it’s all of Lancre and Überwald; it’s crammed full of lore and easter eggs. You can create your own seemingly endless Feegle name, for instance. You can decide which innocuous thing your Black Ribboner has transferred their obsession onto. You can play as a pig witch, if that so takes your fancy. There are quite a lot of little references and deep cuts, especially in the adventures. We have many sets in both Überwald and Lancre, but a couple explore the wider Ramtops, including one that lets you visit Oi Dong, as well as various other monks you find hanging about, monking like they’ve got nothing better to do.  

You can back Adventures in Lancre and Überwald on Gamefound now.

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