Being a great fan of the works of Terry Pratchett I have been patiently waiting for a Discworld game for some time and finally it has arrived. The summer of 1998 saw the release of GURPS Discworld. GURPS is a system I have never used before but that's OK because the book comes with a copy of GURPS Light in the back. I shall probably ignore most of it anyway. :-) What I really wanted was the source material to give me some ideas on how to run a Discworld game because I am a lazy bugger and couldn't be bothered working it out myself. This I got.
I decided it would be fun to set a game around a university but I didn't want to use UU as it has been very well described in the books and is therefore somewhat limiting. The other problem with running a game set anywhere where the books have covered in detail is that there is a lot of pressure to come up with something as well crafted as the books themselves. To avoid all that unpleasantness I have created an entirely new city turnwise around the circle sea from Ankh-Morpork on the banks of the river Smarl. I decided to put it here since it allows the player characters to be close enough to such well known places as Ankh-Morpork, Sto Helit and even Lancra that they can visit them but not on a regular basis.
The city itself, called Elmhome, may be somewhat familiar in general appearance to anyone who has looked at a map of Durham. I make no apologies for this, if Terry Pratchett can steal great chunks of London and York then I can run off laughing with the entirety of Durham.
I have written a brief history of Elmhome and a description of some of the more prominent features. There is also a more detailed description of the University of Elmhome Please feel free to misappropriate these for your own game if you want.
You may also read some of my thoughts concerning events which may occur in the game. Originally I was planning to run this game over the summer/autumn of 98 unfortunately that fell through partly due to lack of organisation and partly due to me getting a job and moving to Oxford.