Trivia / Discworld

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• Bury Your Art: The hard drive with all of the unfinished notes and manuscripts for future books in the series was crushed with a steamroller after Pratchett's death, to prevent anyone from trying to finish up his work and release it after his death.
• Died During Production: With Terry Pratchett's death, the Discworld series' last book is the last one that Pratchett wrote: the Tiffany Aching book The Shepherd's Crown, which was published posthumously in August 2015. His daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, has said that she will be the "caretaker" of Discworld, but won't write any books. Enforced by one of the stipulations of Pratchett's will: that the hard drive with all his unfinished work and notes be destroyed. And it was — with a steamroller.
• Hypothetical Casting: In Usenet discussion, Terry Pratchett suggested Pete Postlethwaite as his conception of Sir Sam Vimes and James Spader for Havelock Vetinari. He also reportedly specified "the bad guy from Die Hard" (Alan Rickman) for the role of Vetinari.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: There are, unfortunately, some pretty sticky legal reasons for why the Discworld games have not yet seen a proper GOG release. While the Terry Pratchett estate owns the rights to the series' characters, the actual games are stuck in licensing hell due to the collapse of developer Psygnosis and the rights never being firmly carried over to another company. Thus, if you want to play them, you'll have no choice but to Keep Circulating the Tapes^note Fortunately, the games are fairly easy to find on eBay, and running the first two on modern systems is entirely possible with ScummVM.
• Spin-Off Cookbook: Nanny Ogg's Cookbook by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan. Largely in-universe, with extra-diagetic "Editor's Notes" about the need to substitute Roundworld measurements and utensils. It's also noted that some recipes have been adjusted to provide "the look but not the taste", including the whole section on dwarfish cooking.
• Tribute to Fido: Lady Jane, the evil-tempered gyrfalcon who is constantly attacking Hodgesaargh, is named after a real falcon, just as Hodgesaaargh is named after a real falconer.
• Unfinished Episode: Terry Pratchett had a number of ideas and unfinished works before he died. According to his assistant Rob, there were ten unfinished novels in Terry's archives, which could have included other Discworld novels. Alas, they all got steamrolled.
  • Scouting For Trolls was mentioned by Sir Terry in an interview as a possible future book. Some background material has emerged — scouting is extant in Ankh-Morpork according to one of the squibs in the A Blink of the Screen collection and a scene where Carrot is running a scout troop comprising two rival gangs appears in Jingo. A minor character in Raising Steam is mentioned to be a scout.
  • More Moist von Lipwig books:
    • Raising Taxes — at the end of Making Money Vetinari and Drumknott have a brief conversation about the need for reform of Ankh-Morpork's archaic tax system and Moist von Lipwig is mooted as a possible architect. The title was mentioned by Sir Terry during promotional tours for Making Money but the book appears to have been radically reworked into Raising Steam instead.
    • Running Water — mentioned once by Terry at a book festival as a potential book featuring Moist von Lipwig getting into either the logging industry, the canal industry or piped water for Ankh-Morpork, depending on which rumour is correct.
  • The afterword of The Shepherd's Crown mentions some other ideas.
    • Twilight Canyons — a group of elderly people solve a missing treasure mystery and foil the rise of a dark lord despite failing memories.
    • The Dark Incontinent — presumably would have done for Africa what The Last Continent did for Australia with carnivorous plants and a crystal cave. At the last Discworld Convention he attended, Terry commented that he'd worked out how to do it without being offensive or patronising and it would involve parody "but probably not in the way you expect".
    • An unnamed book about Constable Feeney from Snuff investigating a whodunnit amongst the goblins.
    • An unnamed sequel to The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents detailing his adventures as a ship's cat.
  • Neil Gaiman's foreword in "A Stroke of the Pen" mentions that Sir Terry once showed him part of a story involving Rincewind's mother, as well as a segment cut from Moving Pictures involving a "Dunnikin Diver" (a subset of plumber introduced in Pyramids).

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