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Stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way round. Stories... have evolved... The strongest have survived, and they have grown fat... Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow... A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed... Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats.
A world, and a mirror of worlds.
The Discworld, a flat planet carried by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic space-turtle, is the venue for Sir Terry Pratchett's long running fantasy series.
The first few books were a straightforward parody of Heroic Fantasy tropes, but later books have subverted, played with, and hung lampshades on practically every trope on this site, in every genre, and many not yet covered, as well as parodying (and in some cases, deconstructing) many well known films, books, and TV series. The humour ranges from simple wordplay to wry reflections on the absurdities of life.
While all of the Discworld books exist in the same Constructed World, with the same continuity (and roughly in chronological order, with a few exceptions), many can be loosely grouped into different series, following some of Pratchett's recurring characters. These include Rincewind the incompetent "wizzard", The Ankh-Morpork City Watch (which are usually mystery novels), the Lancre witches (which lend themselves well to Shakespeare) and Death. Some books follow one-off protagonists who may or may not appear in supporting roles in other books.
In addition to the main characters, there is a large cast of recurring characters, including dodgy street trader Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and benevolent tyrant Havelock Vetinari ('benevolent' in the sense that he's a much nicer tyrant than his predecessors). Villains have included sociopathic geniuses, eldritch abominations, and the Auditors of Reality, cosmic bureaucrats who consider life too untidy to be tolerated.
As of October, 2009, there are thirty-seven books in the series, four of them young-adult, as well as several short stories. There are also Discworld calendars, diaries, maps, compendia, three Video Games * Four if you include the Colour Of Magic 1986 text adventure and a pen and paper RPG, each with additional background information about the Disc. All the books have been adapted for the stage, two have become animated series, and two (technically three, as The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were filmed as a single story under the former title, but the second is a direct follow-on) have become live-action Made For TV Movies.
See also the character sheet for details on the more major of the series' Loads And Loads Of Characters, and the fan-run L-Space Web for quotes, annotations, and even a reading order guide for the uninitiated. Unfortunately, these annotations haven't updated since Going Postal, from 2004.
The main Discworld novels, in order of release. Brackets denote date of UK publication and main character(s) - standalone indicates that it is not currently part of a series.
The young adult Discworld novels:
Children's books:
Illustrated novels:
-
FaustEric (1990- Rincewind; also available in paperback novel format)
- The Last Hero (2001- Rincewind, The City Watch; republished with more illustrations)
Other:
- The Mapps
- The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
- The Discworld Mapp
- A Tourist's Guide To Lancre
- Death's Domain
Tropes that are not specific to one character (or group of characters) and appeared in three or more books (anything else should go in those pages, since otherwise half the tropes on this site would be listed):
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Death's scythe, Carrot's sword, and Inigo Skimmer's palm knife. Especially Death's scythe, which is described as "proverbially sharp" and can cut the dialog in the book when it's swung. It exudes an aura of sharpness that extends several inches from the actual blade- because it is that sharp.
- Addiction Displacement: all Black Ribboner vampires turn to a particular obsession (coffee, photography, politics, et cetera) as a psychological substitute for craving human blood. Sam Vimes also replaces alcohol with cigars.
- All Trolls Are Different: The trolls are actually made of stone, instead of turning to stone. They sometimes go dormant for long periods of time and are mistaken for rocks.
- Amusing Alien: The Luggage.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: While there a few good ones in the books, the aristocrats of Ankh-Morpork are generally a bunch of blithering idiots who are as incompetent in politics as they are in military matters.
- Arson Murder And Jaywalking
- A Worldwide Punomenon: Pratchett likes to include at least one silly pun a book.
- Bad Ass: Many of the heros and villains are one variety or another of Bad Ass, including the Magical Nanny and the nine-year-old farm girl.
- Not related to the trope in question there is also the home village of Eskarina Smith that was named after an ill-behaved donkey, which is also where one of the most Bad Ass characters happens to live.
- Bad Guy Bar: The Mended Drum (originally the "Broken Drum")
- Bolt Of Divine Retribution: Gods tend to throw these at people who annoy them, particularly atheists.
- Brick Joke: Happens quite often, even across books in the form of Continuity Nods. As one example, in The Truth, there's mention of someone trying to pass a parrot off as a dog by teaching it to bark and writing "DoG" on its feathers. In The Last Hero, Leonard of Quirm is shown feeding a bunch of birds, one of which is that parrot.
- Characterization Marches On: Remember when the The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork was obese? Or when Death seemed to actively cause people to die rather than merely collect their souls? Both have gotten excuses, one of which is that Death changed character after Mort, the other that it was a different Patrician. Word Of God denies the latter, admiting it is this trope.
- Character Development: Or rather, setting development. Over the course of the series, Ankh-Morpork goes from a Wretched Hive locked in Medieval Stasis to a bustling Steam Punk City Of Adventure.
- It's still a pretty much a Wretched Hive, it's just that everyone is more civilized about it.
- Chekhovs Gun - Pterry is evidently a huge fan of these. If it's not in a footnote, then you can put good money on that aside bit of characterization, world-building, rule, or so forth to become vitally important near the end of the book.
- City Of Adventure: Ankh-Morpork
- The City Narrows: The Shades within Ankh-Morpork where the cops never go for fear of not coming out alive (of course that makes it ok for those members of the Watch who aren't technically alive).
- Classical Movie Vampire
- Continuity Nod
- Crazy Prepared: Commander Samuel Vimes has set up numerous traps at his home and office to deal with those pesky Assassins, to the point that some of the more mean-spirited instructors have begun sending out students to do "mock assassinations." If they can draw a bead on him with a crossbow, they pass. Good luck.
- Lord Vetinari doesn't need to be Crazy Prepared, he is Crazy Informed.
- But also Crazy Prepared — he reinforced his own dungeon door so it was lockable from inside, just in case he ever got thrown in there and needed to hold off an angry mob.
- Even better, said dungeon had hidden locker with important goods, doorkey included.
- Culture Chop Suey: Numerous examples, one of them lampshaded by a discussion amongst the gods about the empires on the Counterweight Continent:
"McSweeneys?"
"Very old family."
"Oh."
- De Fictionalization: A number of board/card games appear in the novels, and several of them have been given real life versions, Thud! being one example. Several of these (Thud! included) may or may not qualify as Variant Chess.
- The Don: "honest businessmen" Harry King (complete with missing pinky) and the Troll Chrysoprase. Being a troll, the latter is naturally called the Ton.
- Excuse Me Coming Through: An important element of the Law of Narrative Causality, complete with lampshade and two guys carrying a pane of glass.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Most cultures in the series have some real-life equivalent, often to create an Anachronism Stew fantasy setting.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Crossbows generally take the place of firearms on Discworld, though firearms are by no means non-existent.
- Fantasy Pantheon: The gods play games with the lives of men and toss bricks and lightning bolts at athiests.
- Flat World
- Fluffy Tamer: Lady Sybil Ramkin and her dragons. Nanny Ogg and Greebo.
- Footnote Fever: They show up in most of the books to provide often-humorous clarification or deeper history on some topics.
- Fridge Brilliance: Thank goodness for the Pratchett File.
- Also counts as a Genius Bonus in many cases. Only the most widely travelled of readers will get most of them, let alone some of the more obscure ones....
- Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire: all the members of the League of Temperance, who only drink animal blood taken from slaughterhouses.
- Or switch to something completly different. Coffee anyone?
- Fur And Loathing: Averted. Even though the books mention fur comes from animals, they do not look down on anyone for wearing it.
- Genre Savvy and Dangerously Genre Savvy
- The Grim Reaper: Death put in at least one appearance in every single Discworld novel except The Wee Free Men.
- Guile Hero: Moist, Vetinari (although his position on the hero-villain continuum is complicated), Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, all in different ways.
- Hilarity Ensues: Just about every page.
- Horse Of A Different Color: Vermine, "a more careful relative of the lemming" with black and white fur much prized by royalty and nobility for lining their robes.
- Its fur is also much prized by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it.
- Hold Your Hippogriffs
- If You Know What I Mean: the novels make fairly heavy usage of innuendo and oblique references to disguise more adult subjects, either for humor (drinking songs like "A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End" and "The Hedgehog Song") or for delicacy (King Lorenzo the Kind is only described as being "very fond of children" in the series itself - this is plainly doubletalk for "sadistic pedophile").
- Uh... what exactly verse of The Hedgehog Song is "oblique"?
- It's oblique because in the books you only ever hear the song referred to, you never see the lyrics. Those lyrics are creations of the fandom.
- Not sure if those actually are from the fandom itself, seeing as how we get a few lines in one of the books focusing on the Lancre Witches. I think it was Wyrd Sisters.
- The Igor: An entire family of them that does henching and mad science professionally. They also pioneer surgical techniques and do it almost recreationally; one of them has a pet dog made up of the pieces of many other pet dogs, and isn't too broken up about it when Scraps gets killed off because it's only a matter of time until the next thunderstorm.
- It's important to also note that the male Igors are Kavorka Men and considered quite the prize for young women, whereas the Igorinas are CuteMonsterGirls mixed with Hello Nurse — In lieu of scarred up bodies, they are mind-bogglingly attractive except for a bit of cute stitching for show, for example around a wrist like a tattoo, or in a celtic-like pattern on their cheeks.
- Jerkass Gods: Most of the gods are fairly weak and mundane, but some of the more powerful ones view human life as a game for them to manipulate.
- Just Following Orders: subverted, inverted, played with, deconstructed, and generally given hell from (at the very latest) Guards!Guards onwards.
- Made Of Phlebotinum: This verse can seem ordinary enough at first glance, until it's pointed out that, without heavy duty magic involved, a flat world on the back of a giant turtle that swims through space should be utterly impossible.
- The magic is so thick that it 'slows down light' to create timezones on the disc. Magic heavy areas also completely and utterly play with the laws of physics, making the entire world plausible.
- Magitek: Due to his job before writing, Pratchett likes to compare magic to nuclear physics. And then there's...Hex.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: Standard medical practice in Ankh-Morpork is hitting the patient over the head with a hammer. The only real doctor in the city is seen as crazy.
- Million To One Chance: Invoked whenever someone needs a long shot to happen. Most notable in Guards Guards, where the Watch is trying to make an impossibly difficult shot, then deliberately makes things even harder to raise the odds to exactly 1,000,000 to 1.
- Misfit Mobilization Moment: The reformation of the
Night City Watch, particularly in Men-At-Arms.
- Modest Royalty: Carrot is the last living descendent of the royal line. He denies it to anyone who asks, perhaps due in large part to Vimes's influence, but he does make use of near-supernatural royal charisma and occasionally drops by Vetinari's office to make gentle suggestions that are surprisingly often accepted.
- Mugging The Monster: Usually Angua, but has happened to others enough that the robber at the beginning of The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents had to go through a little checklist before he'd try to attack the coach.
- Also, Casanunda makes a cameo in Carpe Jugulum just to witness a highwayman getting killed by the Magpyrs.
- Noodle Incident: Several Ankh-Morpork-based books make references to "what happened to Mr. Hong when he opened the Three Jolly Luck Take-Away Fish Bar on the site of the old fish-god temple in Dagon Street on the night of the full moon." (The implication is something very nasty involving an Eldritch Abomination.)
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Frequently.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Swamp dragons are unstable, Ugly Cute little runts which manufacture volatile chemicals in their insides for firebreathing purposes and are prone to exploding violently. Noble dragons are your typical fantasy dragon, but have all disappeared for some reason.
- Our Dwarves Are All The Same: Except they are really against admitting their gender in public. And they have a law against erasing words, as they consider the written word to be sacred. Oh, and they spell it "Dwarfs".
- Our Vampires Are Different: All vampire myths are true in Discworld, but don't necessarily apply to any given vampire.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: They have great regenerative capabilities, are only truly vulnerable to silver, can switch freely between wolf and human form unless they are in the light of the full moon (which renders them wolves), and they struggle with conflicting sets of instincts and thought processes after changing. They're considered undead on the basis of, "They're big and scary, they come from Uberwald, and they don't die when you stick them with a sword, what more do you want?"
- Painting The Fourth Wall: Death who talks like this has his own font, as do Golems in some books; Carrot's letters and their "ballistic approach to grammar"; the Auditors talk outside of dialogue (One thinks, one speaks like this); particularly odd looking signs might actually appear in the books as poorly drawn handwriting; etc etc. Pratchett doesn't as much paint the fourth wall as much as he uses a nice wallpaper and hangs an attractive painting off it.
- Pimped Out Dress: Naturally, ladies of stature will wear one when appropriate. Four notable examples are the vermine-trimmed coronation dress Princess Keli Sto Lat wears in Mort, the dress Granny Weatherwax steals to infiltrate the ball in Witches Abroad and the one she wears to infiltrate the opera in Maskerade, and the gaudy dress Cheery Littlebottom wears in The Fifth Elephant to show she was embracing her gender. Lady Sybil inverts this by having the rank suitable to wear such dresses, and clumping around in tweed and galoshes.
- Playing With A Trope: If it's possible for a creator's entire body of work to serve as a Most Triumphant Example, this is it.
- Power Limiter: The Unseen University of the Wizards is full of bureaucracy, bickering, eating, lazing around and pointless activities in general - all of which are found to have been very necessary when the system is temporarily overturned in Sourcerer and the entire wizarding population goes into all-out destruction-mode. It turns out that the base instinct of a wizard is to build a magic tower and obliterate all other wizards until they're the last one (in fact, the the ancient plural of "wizard" was "war"). The current comforts, luxuries and politics of the Unseen University act as checks to keep that instinct suppressed.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Vetinari does not actually rule his realm with an iron fist. He has the novel idea of maintaining control by making people actually WANT him in charge, or at the very least, make removing him from power an unsavory prospect.
- The problem is that the guild leaders and nobility all hate each other too much to support any other candidate. There's also the fact that virtually every other Patrician before Vetinari has turned out to be insane, or has become insane once they've taken the position.
- Pretty In Mink: When some characters want to glam up their appearance.
- Rule Of Funny: Explicitly mentioned several times- one footnote makes reference to the "new rules of comedy" which state that the droll results of wild shots in the air must be told to the public.
- Sand Is Water: The Dehydrated Ocean.
- Sanity Ball: Let's just say there are several bouncing around.
- Security Blanket: Weapon of choice against Bogeymen. Because of the nature of belief, they are tricked into thinking that things under blankets (like scared children hiding under the covers) don't exist... so if you put a bogeyman under a blanket, it causes severe, crippling existential questions.
- Self Proclaimed Liar: Casanunda.
- Shout Out: So very many that the fandom collected them into The Annotated Pratchett File. (Written before wikis.)
- Slasher Smile: Carcer. Mr. Teatime. Vimes. The werewolves in Uberwald. Death (by dint of having no other option while using the scythe).
- Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Played with. The tone of the books and most of the characters are definitely on the cynical side — the idealistic ones tend to be portrayed as naive, dumb or putting up a front. However, the universe itself is idealistic: the good guys do triumph, almost always in a Big Damn Heroes way. This is explicitly due to narrativium.
- Smart People Play Chess: In the later novesls, Vetinari has a rare Thud! board in his viewing room and plays a friend by clacks.
- T Word Euphemism: Lots, from the vampires' refrain of "the B-vord", Mr. Tulip's repeated use of "—-ing", Quoth the Raven's "N-word", and Moist Von Lipwig's tirade against Reacher Gilt in Going Postal.
- Talking Animal: Usually due to the magical equivalent of radioactive waste.
- Those Two Guys: Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs.
- Title Drop: Several of the books contain their title phrases at least once.
- Trope Overdosed: So very, very much.
- Wiki Walk: Leonard of Quirm, the wizards of the university, and some many other characters are fond of these.
- Wizarding School: Unseen University, which exists as much to keep the current wizards out of trouble as it does to raise the next generation of them. There's also Bugarup University in Xxxx, and, just recently, Brazeneck University in Quirm, with references at least one more in Pseudopolis and possibly many others.
- Wizards Live Longer: Barring fatal accidents, most wizards live well past their nineties, even with their horrible Big Eater habits. A wizard who lives past fifty can expect to live past one hundred.
- The Wonderland: not just different, but Prachett often takes time in the narration to explain just how different everything is, from how time flows to the shape of the world...
- A Worldwide Punomenon: So many puns...
- Writer On Board: Some people have complained that they think Terry Pratchett's personal beliefs and philosophies intrude too much into the later books. Your Mileage May Vary.
- Not entirely surprising for a satirical series, though.
- X Makes Anything Cool: Agnes Nitt desperately tries to acquire some cool by (briefly) assuming the name Perdita X Dream.
- Your Vampires Suck: An entire book on this trope, before it ends with "Classic vampires are awesome."
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