Discworld Game: Five Ways to Play in Ankh-Morpork
If you are looking for a Discworld game, there are five real ways to play one today. You can run Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the official tabletop roleplaying game from Modiphius. You can play Modiphius’s newer board and card games with friends. You can log in to Discworld MUD, a free text game that volunteers have run for decades. You can hunt down the point-and-click adventures from the 1990s. Or you can play inside a Pratchett novel yourself, as your own character, with a narrator that has read the book and answers whatever you type. Which one fits depends on whether you want a table of friends, a game night, a long-running online world, a piece of nostalgia, or simply more time on the Disc after the last page.
This guide goes through all five, says who each one is for, and ends with how to try the last one tonight without paying anything.
What people mean by a Discworld game
The phrase covers several wishes, and it helps to know which one is yours.
- You want to play with friends. A group of hapless adventurers in the Shades, a Watch patrol that goes wrong, a heist at the Unseen University. This is a tabletop wish.
- You want the old games back. Rincewind, the Luggage and the jokes you remember from a CD-ROM. This is a nostalgia wish.
- You want to live in the city. Join a guild, own a shop, meet the characters from the books, and come back to the same world night after night.
- You want to step into a particular book. Walk the streets of Ankh-Morpork or the hills of Lancre as Pratchett wrote them, and make choices the novel never offered. This is the reader’s wish.
The table below shows where each option lands.
The five options side by side
| Adventures in Ankh-Morpork | Board and card games | Discworld MUD | 1990s adventure games | Play inside the book | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Tabletop rulebooks | Games for a table | Online text game | Point-and-click PC games | Written game in a browser |
| Players | 2 to 6, one runs it | 2 to 4 | Many, online together | Just you | Just you |
| Rules | Standard polyhedral dice | Learned from the box | Typed commands | Click and solve puzzles | None to learn; you type |
| Story | Made up by your group | Emerges from play | Your own, among other players | Written by the studio | Grows from your choices, grounded in the novel |
| Best for | Groups who want Pratchett humour at the table | A game night | Players who want a lasting world | Nostalgia | Readers who want a specific book’s world |
The claims about each game below are as of September 2026, read from the publishers’ own pages.
Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the tabletop RPG
Modiphius publishes the officially licensed Discworld roleplaying game. Its own collection page describes it like this:
“Based on Sir Terry Pratchett’s beloved fantasy series, Adventures in Ankh-Morpork is the officially licensed Discworld tabletop roleplaying game.”
The same page says the game uses “the standard seven-dice polyset (d4 to d20)”, so the dice you already own will do, and that “the rules are designed to stay out of the way whenever the story demands it”. That suits the books, where the fun is in the talking and the misunderstandings more than in the fighting. Modiphius sells a digest edition of the core rulebook, a PDF, and a starter set. Its press release announces a second campaign, Adventures in Lancre and Uberwald, planned for later in 2026, which is where the Witches and the Chalk come in.
Pick it if you have a regular group, somebody willing to run it, and friends who will enjoy a story where things go sideways on purpose.
It is weaker for anyone without that group. A game master has to learn the rules, prepare sessions, and keep the whole city of Ankh-Morpork straight in their head.
The board and card games
Modiphius has also announced two games that need no game master at all. The first is Discworld: Readers Digested, which its press release calls a licensed edition of Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon City, reskinned in Discworld theming and “designed for 2-4 players”. The second is a card game called Kill Sam Vimes, which, in Modiphius’s words, “drops your unlucky assassins into a contract to kill the titular character”. Both were announced for release during 2026, so check the shop for which one you can buy today.
Pick it if you want an evening of Discworld with friends and nobody willing to prepare anything.
It is weaker for the roleplaying wish. You play cards and tiles rather than speak as a character, and the story is the one the game produces.
Discworld MUD, the free online text game
Discworld MUD has been running for a very long time, and it is still alive. Its home page describes it plainly:
“Discworld MUD is a multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett.”
It is also free. The same page says “There is no cost to play Discworld MUD, it is developed and maintained entirely by volunteers.” You play in a browser, join one of seven guilds (assassins, priests, thieves, warriors, witches, wizards or fools), and can own a house, run a shop, or write for the local newspaper. The world is enormous and full of Pratchett’s own characters.
Pick it if you want a lasting world to come back to, other players to meet, and you enjoy the old-fashioned pleasure of typed commands.
It is weaker for a newcomer who wants a story to start at once. A MUD has a learning curve of commands and conventions, and the story is what you make of a shared world rather than a narrative built around you.
The 1990s adventure games
Many people searching for a Discworld game remember the point-and-click adventures of the 1990s: Discworld, with Rincewind as the hero, then Discworld II and the detective story Discworld Noir. They are much loved and still very funny. They are also hard to buy today: a search of both Steam and GOG in September 2026 found no Discworld titles for sale.
Pick them if you already own a copy, or you enjoy the hunt for an old game and the work of getting it running on a modern computer.
They are weaker for anyone who wants to start tonight, and they tell a fixed story. Every player sees the same puzzles and the same ending.
Playing inside the book itself
The fifth way is the newest. You give a narrator the novel itself, and it reads the book before you begin: the places, the people, how they speak, what they know and what they hide. You are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent. Then you make your own character, step into that world, and type what you do. There is no list of choices. You can join the Night Watch in Guards! Guards!, apprentice yourself to a witch in Lancre, or try to sell something to CMOT Dibbler, and the narrator keeps the world consistent with what the author wrote.
This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a copy of a book you own, as a
.txt or .epub file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world before your
first scene. Because it works from the text rather than from a preset, each
Discworld novel becomes its own game. Small Gods plays nothing like Going
Postal, which is exactly how the books feel.
Pick it if what you miss after the last page is the world itself, and you would rather be a junior clerk at the Post Office tonight than learn a rulebook first.
It is weaker for players who want a group or a table. It is a written story, read and typed, like a patient game master who never tires. It also needs the book file, so you use your own copy.
For the wider field, see AI roleplaying and solo role playing games. If you enjoy a text world, our guide to interactive fiction games covers the wider tradition that Discworld MUD belongs to, and our Mistborn RPG guide does the same job as this one for another fantasy series.
What it takes to start each one
| Option | How to start | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Adventures in Ankh-Morpork | Order the core rulebook or starter set | A group and a game master |
| Board and card games | Buy the box once it is out | A few players and an evening |
| Discworld MUD | Open its browser client | A web browser and patience with commands |
| 1990s adventure games | Find an old copy | A way to run an old PC game |
| LLM RPG | Open the site in a browser | Nothing for the first five turns |
With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all, and signing up adds free credits. The current plans are on the pricing page.
How to start a Discworld game tonight
If playing inside the book sounds like your kind of game, this is the whole path from nothing to your first scene.
- Try it with no account. Open a ready-made world and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
- Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password.
- Upload the book. Choose the Discworld novel you want to live in, as a
.txtor.epubfile from your own copy. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play. - Make your character. A new recruit to the Watch, a failed student wizard, a troll looking for honest work. You are a new person in the book’s world, so you can be anyone.
- Type what you do. “I ask the Librarian for a book on dragons.” “I try to talk my way past the guard at the Patrician’s palace.” The narrator answers in the book’s voice and remembers what you did, including the promises you made.
When a table, a MUD or an old CD is the better choice
Be honest about the evening you want. If you have friends who want to bumble through Ankh-Morpork together, a tabletop game gives you stories nobody else will ever have, and Adventures in Ankh-Morpork is built for exactly that. If you want a game night with no preparation, the board and card games do it. If you want a big shared world full of other players, Discworld MUD has been waiting for you for years and costs nothing. If you want to hear Rincewind again, the old adventures are worth the hunt.
A written game fits a different moment: you have just closed a Discworld novel, the next one is on the shelf, and you want to stay on the Disc as yourself. That is the moment it was built for.