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In General
The numerous deities populating the many pantheons of the Discworld. Not so much worshiped as blamed, being generally more trouble then they're worth.
- Angels, Devils and Squid: On a good day they'll count as Angels though it's pointed out there's not much difference between gods and demons, with it ultimately being the same distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters.
- Badass Decay: A few of the older gods end up fading into history over the course of Discworld history, as new gods come into existence. Notably, The Old Gods (as in, the Anthropomorphic Personifications who dictate fate and chance, like "The Lady" and Death) still supersede the "modern" and "manmade" gods in sheer power.
- Bolt of Divine Retribution: Their typical response to clever dicks going around wondering whether they exist or not.
- Council of Angels: Functionally this as actual creator deities don't stick around for long.
- Cosmic Chess Game: They spent most of their time playing around with the lives of Discworld heroes. When a group of heroes make this discovery in The Last Hero, they are not pleased and decide to strike back.
- Deity of Human Origin: Very rarely, a person who is worshiped or beloved enough by a group of people (say, the Duchess of Borogravia) can be elevated to a position of genuine godhood after death.
- Demoted to Extra: Their influence fades as the Discworld lore expanded over time. Though this is due to Terry Pratchett making more stories that didn't involve the gods, an In-Universe example occurs with The Last Hero, where two squads of mortals converge on Dunmanifestin and leave, disillusioned with their deities and more assertive with their own destinies.
- Divine Conflict: In the early novels, they are engaged in an aeons-long feud with the Ice Giants, who play their radio too loud and have refused to return the lawnmower.
- Driven by Envy: It’s implied in The Color of Magic that while their own world is absolutely spectacular, they’re embarrassed by its Awesome, but Impractical nature and compare it with other Boring, but Practical worlds that aren't as wondrous but function better.
- Fantasy Pantheon: While Gods Need Prayer Badly produces swarms of small gods and Odd Job Gods, the most prominent deities like Blind Io and Offler the Crocodile God form a recognizable pantheon. Small Gods provides a rare monotheistic example in the Great God Om, but believing Om is the only god doesn't actually make it so, and Om has to deal with the pantheon somehow. There's also a Bast, a cat headed god, but the only difference with the Egyptian cat goddess appears to be the gender.
- Fate Worse than Death: If all the worshipers of a god dies, than they become "small gods" and go crazy, become rabid whispers on the wind found far from civilization who desperately try to cajole anyone who passes through into worshiping them (often driving those unfortunate sods to madness in the process).
- The Gods Must Be Lazy: Death often gripes that he's the only one to meet people at the end of their lives, because no god the person believes in puts in an appearance to take them to whichever afterlife is set out.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: They can survive for a while without prayer, but if they can't find a new source of it, eventually they'll fade away and become "small gods".
- Home of the Gods: Theirs is Dunmanifestin, the city at the top of Cori Celesti, a ridiculously tall mountain at the center of their (disc-shaped, duh) world. There they spend their time playing games with the lives of mortals. It appears in The Last Hero as a vast structure of conflicting architectural styles, the gods coming from various different cultures, and also having zero taste.
- Jerkass Gods: All of them. Things like "mercy" or "empathy" or "thinking this through" aren't concepts they can wrap their heads around. That being said, a few are eventually shown to be slightly more moral and decent than others (i.e., Om post-Character Development and Offler), while others are more just as clueless and/or out of their depth as their own followers (like P'tang-P'tang, the newtlike god of a tiny tribe of 51 fishermen).
- King of All Cosmos: The entire pantheon. Most of them are incredibly kooky, quirky, and just plain bizarre, even on the best of days.
- Not only the deities who venture more into Crystal Dragon Jesus territory, like Blind Io and Fate, but the slightly odder ones, like the god of great ideas you forget to write down and will never remember again, the "Oh God" of hangovers, the goddess of the afternoon, the goddess of small dead things left half-digested on the porch (she has a cat head), the goddess of things that get stuck in drawers, and *cough* the Lady.
- Meanwhile, the Creator of the Discworld is an absent-minded little guy who's basically an engineer working on spec, who laid down the terrain and then left it for somebody else to equip with life (not his department).
- Mirroring Factions: Fate and the Lady come under this as archrivals due to their functions of order and chance.
- Nature Spirit: A few Discworld gods were basically minor nature spirits that become more powerful through mortal belief.
- Our Gods Are Different: They run the gamut. However, it's shown as gods need (and are shaped by) belief: The more belief, the stronger the god. If you only have one believer, well you might be able to summon a minor thunderstorm over one person's head. The other end is Death, whom everything believes in (though he identifies himself more as an Anthropomorphic Personification, which are merely shaped by belief at most, not requiring it). One god seems to get by believing in his own work. They aren't outright cosmic forces though, like the Auditors, but those are not the subject of worship and have no need for it.
- To further clarify, gods in the Discworld have two main varieties - proper "gods" and "Creators". Creators are cosmic entities that... well, create entire universe and worlds, such as the eponymous Discworld before letting everything sort itself out since seeing everything through isn't their department. Gods as people both on the Discworld and in Real Life would conceive of them are spirits of nature that wander the world and are empowered by mortal belief. The more genuine and widespread the belief, the stronger the god.
- Stock Gods: They come in several varieties with some using different personas to keep power. Blind Io, for instance, serves as every Discworld culture's thunder-and-lightning god.
Anoia
Goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, formerly a volcano goddess called Lela before she modernised and upgraded to a minor but more universal portfolio. Every exclamation of "How can it close on the damned thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?" is as praise unto Anoia. First mentioned in Going Postal, she made a small personal appearance in Wintersmith.
- Beware the Silly Ones: It's Anoia that Moist prays to for help in Making Money, considering that she owes him for her explosion in popularity following the events of Going Postal. When at the end of the book Moist is confronted in a dark alley by Cribbins, who's holding his girlfriend Adora Belle Dearheart at knifepoint to try and extort money from him, Anoia apparently intervenes by making Cribbins' spring-loaded dentures violently explode with such force that one of the springs embeds itself in his sinuses and another bursts through his cheek. Moist resolves to hang a ladle up in Anoia's temple in thanks.
- Odd Job Gods: Has one of the most absurdly specific portfolios of any deity on the Discworld, her (apparent) actions in Making Money show that she's not as harmless as you might expect. She also deals with Things That Roll Under Other Things, Things Stuck In Sofa Cushions, and is considering taking on Stuck Zippers. She also eats corkscrews.
- Punny Name: Sounds like "annoy-a", which is appropriate for a goddess whose domain is just being a bloody nuisance to people.
- The Smoking Section: When she drops in on a deified Tiffany in Wintersmith she's constantly smoking a cigarette, believed to be a holdover from her time as the volcano goddess Lela, since this is what she talks about with Tiffany. Tiffany notes that the sparks from her cigarette fall to the floor but don't burn anything.
- Took a Level in Badass: As deities go; she was a very minor goddess whose temple was just a small altar shared by several other minor gods attended to by a jobbing priestess, until Moist chose her effectively at random (because he liked the sound of her name) to be one of the deities he prayed to for assistance before "miraculously" finding a huge stash of money. This massively increased her popularity and standing in Ankh Morpork.
Baron Saturday
A duke of Genoa, who died and came back as a zombie. Appears in Witches Abroad.
- Deity of Human Origin: While he was an ordinary human, the power of Genua elevated him to becoming a deity who appears at Fat Tuesday.
- Disappeared Dad: To Emberella, on account of not being alive.
- Expy: Of the Voudoun god Baron Samedi, with a top hat and coat.
- Insistent Terminology: Death corrects his statement that he wasn't dead, just not alive. And he'd know.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: He wasn't terribly popular when he was alive, but people definitely preferred him to Lilith, because he never forced anyone to be happy while telling them it was for their own good.
Bilious
A Oh God of Hangovers that appeared as one of many "household gods" that popped up in the Hogfather's absence. Appears in Hogfather.
- Butt-Monkey: Poor bugger was born hungover.
- Chekhov's Gunman: All his role is in relevance to the tale is in assisting Susan.
- The Dog Bites Back: The god of wine, Bibulous, drinks as much as he wants without hangovers, which all go to Bilious. When Bilious is magically sobered up, Bibulous suffers for it.
- Insistent Terminology: He's not a god, he's an oh god.
Blind Io
The Disc's thunder god — lightning is used freely by all major deities, but Io jealously guards thunder. He's also the leader of the gods, inasmuch as they have any real hierarchy to be on top of.
- Expy: Of Zeus/Jupiter, primarily, by means of his Top God status, appearance as an old man in a white robe and status as a god of thunder. His eyelessness and former raven servants also have shades of Odin.
- Eyeless Face: He has no eyes beneath his blindfold, only smooth skin.
- God of Thunder: He holds the divine copyright on thunder. In fact, he actually absorbed all lesser thunder gods of the Disc — not only is he the Thunder God, he's also every thunder god.
- Top God: He's generally acknowledged as the leader of the Discworld's gods, although it seems to be an honorary title more than anything else.
Death
Death is not worshipped, but as an Anthropomorphic Personification he qualifies a place on this thread.
To see more about him, check out his main page
.
Duchess Annagrovia
A stateman of Borogravia, who becomes a goddess. Appears in Monstrous Regiment.
- Blessed with Suck: She's now a minor goddess of her country... but can't do anything with her power because people only pray to her so that she can get their now-dead former god Nuggan to fix everything. In other words, she has to constantly hear countless innocent people desperately screaming out to her for help but be unable to lift a proverbial finger to change anything. No wonder she's so miserable.
- Deadpan Snarker: There's a hint of this about her in typical aristocratic style in her one voiced appearance.
- Deity of Human Origin: The Duchess evidently became this after her death, as people stopped praying to Nuggan and prayed to her instead. This isn't really that hard to imagine in the Discworld, though, where any concept which receives a sufficient amount of faith and/or worship is capable of manifesting in this way. Unfortunately for both her and Borogravia, they imagined her as an intermediary between them and Nuggan. Since Nuggan is dead (possibly at the hands of the Bard in The Last Hero), makes her utterly useless and implied to be why Wazzer says she's often crying - she hears all these pleas for help from her people, but she can't actually do anything about them.
- Expy:
- Of Britannia, the royal avatar of Britain. She's also one for Joan of Arc, an ordinary woman elevated to martyr status, though that more properly applies to her vessel, Wazzer.
- She can also be seen as one for Queen Victoria during The Crimean War, as she is often remembered during this period as having been in a state of great mourning.
- Excessive Mourning: At the beginning of Monstrous Regiment, it's mentioned that the Duchess has been secluded in mourning for decades following the death of her husband. People are beginning to wonder if she's even still alive. She's not; she died, and ended up trapped as an impotent demigod/glorified ghost, and is understandably very unhappy about it.
- Fate Worse than Death: The implied fate of the Duchess. Sure, she was technically elevated to godhood, or thereabouts. But she was explicitly prayed to as an intermediary to Nuggan, to intercede with him, and Nuggan is both highly unpleasant and, more to the point, dead. In other words, she hears all the pain of her people, without actually being able to do anything about it, being only able to move "small things". No wonder Wazzer hears her crying...
- Foil: To Om. Like him, she's nominally worshipped by a nation, but can only really be heard by one devout believer and do small things - though in his case, that's because everyone worships the Church rather than him, and in hers, because the way the belief is structured has her depicted as an intermediary meaning her power is limited. Like him, she arranges things to make a vital intervention to save her follower and their companions, though hers is much more structured than Om's, which is a desperate gamble. And both have mortal perspectives, Om's from having spent a long time incarnate as a tortoise, which served as a Break the Haughty, and the Duchess because she was originally human and really just wants to be allowed to stay dead.
- Gambit Roulette: Her entire scheme to get Wazzer in the same room as the High Command so she can possess her and, rather than lead them in battle, tongue-lash them into going home and letting her go.
- God's Hands Are Tied: As she's only worshipped as an intermediary to another god who is now dead, she can't really do anything of much import and has to resort to try and push "small things" into motion and hope for the best.
- A God I Am Not: Very unusually for Discworld gods and goddesses, she makes it quite plain that she does not see herself as a god - just someone who was "a rather stupid woman" in life, and a glorified ghost after. All she really wants to do is to be allowed to rest - and to end the stupid, pointless cycle of revenge.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: Inverted; She was once an ordinary woman, but after death was elevated to something like godhood because so many people prayed to her. Unfortunately, since they prayed to her as an intermediary to Nuggan, she still can't actually do anything.
- God Was My Copilot: Yes, as it turns out, she really was guiding Wazzer's actions the whole time during Monstrous Regiment.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Even from beyond the grave, she counts as this, apparently having yet to descend into the usual antics of divine figures on the Disc. She's protective of her vessel, Wazzer (even instructing everyone to be kind to Wazzer after she finishes possessing her), tries to help out in whatever small ways she can, promotes Jackrum to Sergeant Major (albeit with a dry back-handed compliment) after previously hinting at how he can get his happy ending, and shames the High Command into doing the right thing - both by the squad and by Borogravia.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: She desperately wants to be one. Or, more accurately, she really wants to be allowed to rest in peace, but failing that, she wants to be this. However, the collective belief of Borogravia isn't enough to grant her the power to do any good (implicitly because they believe she's an intermediary to Nuggan), which causes her tremendous grief. Nevertheless, it turns out that she's been carefully arranging matters through Wazzer so that she can get access to the High Command, who she promptly shames into a) making peace and going home, b) chucking Nuggan, c) letting her rest in peace.
- Stop Worshipping Me: The Duchess. All the prayers to her treat her like a goddess, but as much as she wants to help she's only an elevated ghost, powerless to do anything, and she just wants to be let off the hook.
- Universally Beloved Leader: She was so beloved by the people of Borogravia that she became a goddess after her death.
Fate
A major deity of the Disc, and one of the most feared. He and The Lady are often at odds with each other.
- Black Eyes of Evil: He has dark black eyes containing stars in them, and is one of few beings who can look Death in the eyes squarely.
- Control Freak: As the god of fate, he dictates that things go the way they should and doesn’t like it when they don't.
- Designated Villain: While he is the most antagonistic of the gods, his role is to keeping events in order and on track. That things go unexpectedly wrong because of comedic effect is his burden.
- Mysterious Past: He's not a native to the Disc, and came from some other world after unspecified circumstances.
- Order Versus Chaos: How the conflict between Fate and The Lady is framed, with Fate representing Order and The Lady (Luck) representing Chaos.
The God of Evolution
A god who appears in The Last Continent.
- Beetle Maniac: To the point he's literally made millions of them.note He considers the cockroach to be his ultimate creation, to Ponder Stibbon’s horror.
- Distaff Counterpart: To Ponder Stibbons. Both are academically inclined beings, somewhat saner than their average sort (this god, despite his beetle fetish, is more reasonable than the standard Discworld deity), and both take up an Almighty Janitor role in keeping things running on their respective class.
- Flat-Earth Atheist: A pretty impressive one even by Disc standards. He doesn't believe in gods despite being a god.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: A curious inversion, given that, again, he is a god. He doesn’t need or want believers, but believes strongly enough in what he does that he is sustained by his own belief.
The Hogfather
A Santa Claus expy who delivers gifts to children at the end of every year on the Discworld. He appears in Hogfather.
- Animal Motifs: Pigs. His Christmas on the Discworld is called Hogswatch, he owns a sleigh drawn by pigs (Tusker, Gouger, Snouter, Rooter), and a traditional Hogswatch sweet is a pink sugar pig.
- Full-Boar Action: In the final battle with the auditors, he takes on the form of a boar.
- Mythopoeia: His true role in the Discworld pantheon serves this. For generations he has been the entity children believe in the most, a god who brings gifts every winter. From teaching belief to children, they can grow up to believe other concepts too (even if they outgrow their belief in the Hogfather too). The Auditors employ a plan to destroy the Hogfather and thus cripple the Disc by mind-controlling children to stop believing in the Hogfather.
- Pseudo-Santa: He's an alternate version of Santa on the Discworld.
- Really 700 Years Old: He has been around since the near-genesis of the Disc, noted by his life's record in Death's archives being several shelves, consisting of various chronicles (books, scrolls, skins, etc).
- Small Role, Big Impact: He's absent for most of his novel, and doesn't appear till the end.
Iron Girder
A steam locomotive, created in Raising Steam, that comes to life.
- Beware the Nice Ones: As the notes below suggest, Iron Girder is essentially a benevolent entity. However, when someone tries to sabotage it, it converts them to pink mist.
- Deus est Machina: A friendly sentient locomotive (basically an A.I.) who becomes a minor deity of transportation.
- Good Counterpart: To the Gonne from Men at Arms. It is a device crafted by an inventor that eventually gains sentience, but is used for the sake of establishing peace and solidarity.
The Lady
A mysterious goddess (probably) of luck, frequently seen playing games with the Fates of Men, usually against Fate. Rincewind is one of her favourite pieces, explaining both his unfortunate life and his miraculous survival.
- Ambiguous Situation: While she's generally referred to and treated as a Goddess, her character also has shades of being an Anthropomorphic Personification based on Discworld rules, as she doesn't seem to want anyone to worship her (something which gods generally need). Indeed, she actively punishes any who attempt to actively make a religion around her (temples built in her name often "mysteriously" burn down soon after) or even those who invoke her true name. Despite this lack of open prayer, she's considered one of the more powerful deities on this Discworld. This is partially HandWaved by saying that everyone believes in luck deep down, at least a little.
- The Chessmaster: Good at getting things to work out in her favour from the most unusual circumstances, like the right butterfly in just the right place... she's also a total cheat.
- The Gambling Addict: As the god of chance, she is the patron goddess invoked by all gamblers (professional or just risk-takers). She herself notes that she plays neither to lose nor to win.
- He Who Must Not Be Named: She has a name, but people who say it come to bizarre and improbable ends. Just call her the Lady if you have to.
- Jerkass Gods: She's more supportive to humans than most of the other gods, but not that much. She still plays the game along with the rest of the Pantheon. And bad things tend to happen to people who try worshiping her.
- Additionally, as Cohen points out (and the Lady herself admits) in The Last Hero, while she may provide the million-to-one chances that have helped heroes like Cohen, she's also every other measure of chance that's left so many more to their deaths.
- Lady Luck: It's very strongly implied that she is this.
- Order Versus Chaos: How the conflict between Fate and The Lady is framed, with Fate representing Order and The Lady (Luck) representing Chaos.
- Pet the Dog: She does whatever she can to keep Rincewind alive. Then again, she's also part of the reason he ends up in some much danger in the first place.
- What Beautiful Eyes!: Hers are a magnificent shade of green. Completely green, in fact.
Nuggan
A god who appears in Borogravia, constantly handing out Abominations Unto the unfortunate sods stuck with his as their god. Appears in The Last Hero and Monstrous Regiment.
- Asshole Victim: Considering he was an utter dick, it's hard to feel that bad for him after it's eventually confirmed that he's basically dead due to a lack of worshippers.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: What nearly happened to Om in Small Gods apparently happened to Nuggan; people stopped worshipping the god and started fearing the Abominations while worshipping the Duchess instead, and Nuggan faded in power; in Monstrous Regiment, he's reduced to little more than a petulant voice, and by the end of the book, Commander Vimes reports that research theologians have declared Nuggan dead.
- Jerkass Gods: Nuggan's petty unpleasantness to his own worshippers makes even other gods wince. It doesn't work out well for him.
- The Long List: His Abominations. In Borogravia, holy texts are ringbinders so that new ones can be inserted more easily.
- Mad God: Nuggan and his weekly growing list of Abominations. However, it eventually turns out he isn't mad — he's dead. His worshipers are just so tied up in their constant fear of The Other that their own anxiety is being reflected back in random Abominations.
- Manly Facial Hair: Is noted for having a fussy little moustache.
- The Napoleon: Short, and not terribly physical imposing.
- Sanity Slippage: He steadily loses his sanity along with his peoples' faith.
- Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Is fond of imposing rules on people, whether they make sense or not doesn’t matter to him (e.g. banning chocolate and garlic). This causes people to lose faith in him.
- Shadow Archetype: He's basically Om from Small Gods without the Character Development, having never learned to be nicer or improve as a person to the point that he gradually wasted away to nothing. Bonus points for how, just like Om, his Corrupt Church ultimately grew so tyrannical and hideous that people eventually stopped actually worshipping him and instead started fearing the Abominations and corrupt tortures the Church would concoct.
- Strongly Worded Letter: Nuggan (or what's left of him) is described as the divine equivalent of this sort of person.
- The Friend No One Likes: Even the other gods — who regard most humans as game pieces or walking targets and are generally on about the same level of basic decency as your standard corrupt politician — think Nuggan is a tedious, officious little oik. Notably, when one of his followers sees him and tries to get revenge for a lifetime of suffering, none of the other gods make an effort to intercede.
Offler
A crocodile-headed god popular in Klatch.
- Expy: Crocodile-headed god associated with rivers and popular in the local Egypt analogue... yep, he's definitely Sobek from Egyptian Mythology.
- Graceful Loser: Noted when he loses a round of the game in the very first Discworld novel.
- Non-Human Head: He has a crocodile's head.
- Pet the Dog: He forbids his worshippers from eating broccoli, because nobody likes it anyway, so it's an easy rule to follow and allows his followers to feel good about themselves.
- In The Last Hero he feels an "ungodlike" stab of pity for the Nugganites when he learns they're forbidden from eating ginger, mushrooms, garlic and chocolate at Nuggan's command, which he considers needlessly cruel.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: His religion is showy and theatrical without an excess of dogma or inconvenient rules, and in all his appearances he's generally the most reasonable and cautious of the Gods. As he inwardly observes, part of why he's survived so long is because he realized that congregations need more than just an absence of thunderbolts to keep believing in their patron.
- Speech Impediment: He has a pronounced lisp, on account of his crocodile heads' large fangs.
Om
Om is the god of Omnia, a state somewhere in Discworld's hot desert regions. He starred in Small Gods, and was an example of what happens to gods when people stop believing in them (even if they're still practicing the official religion). In his official form, Om is a great big mighty golden thing with horns, but he spends most of the story as a powerless, petulant, sarcastic tortoise with a lot of natural enemies (including eagles, other small gods, and his own In... uh, Exquisition), because his religion has grown so bureaucratic that he's down to his very last believer. Said believer is an initiate named Brutha, who has faith like stone and roughly the brains of one, too (which is to say, engraved stone — it's actually more challenging for him to forget things).
- Break the Haughty: Most of the events of Small Gods, which transforms Om from a smite-happy God to a leashed, somewhat forgiving type. While the end of the story leaves in doubt how long it'll last, his eventual return in the last Science of the Discworld book shows that it stuck, more or less.
- Brought Down to Normal: When he loses all but one of his believers, he's Brought Down To Tortoise.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: The depiction of Omnianism draws upon Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — mostly Christianity, since the events of Small Gods create a similar split to that between the Old and New Testaments.
- Deadpan Snarker: It's just something about being a tortoise. They're naturally deadpan.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: The depiction of Om comments on this trope, both in terms of how gods work in general, and his specific situation.You're more afraid of him than you are of me, now. Abraxas says here: 'Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed.'— Om, when Brutha refuses his command(ment) to kill Vorbis
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: More recent books imply that Om's faith has begun eclipsing the other gods' specifically because he does not manifest or provide any concrete proof of his existence, so he may actually be the most powerful god on the Disc by now. As such, this ironically means that actually utilizing any of that power would be his undoing. As revealed in Small Gods, though, the reason he didn't do much before the Brutha schism is because he was just that idle. When he does make a physical appearance in the fourth Science of Discworld book as a literal Deus ex Machina, his presence is less than overwhelming, demonstrating better than ever why he does better as a silent and unseen god.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: The Books of Om are more than a little embellished. He's remembered as having imparted commandments unto St. Ossory. All Om remembers is appearing as a pillar of fire and saying "hey, look what I can do!" And that's aside from the parts of His words possibly being made up by a vampire for a lark.
- Loss of Identity: The minute he became a tortoise. He spent two horrible years thinking tortoise-y thoughts until he got close enough to Brutha to regain a bit of godhood.
- Physical God: Unfortunately, most of said godhood didn't make the transition to corporeality.
