Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Literature / Discworld

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/flat-world_discworld_194.png
The turtle moves!

"The Discworld is not a coherent fantasy world. Its geography is fuzzy, its chronology unreliable. A small traveling circle of firelight in a chilly infinity has turned out to be the home of defiant jokes and last chances.
There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which there be dragons? On the Discworld we know that there be dragons everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they be here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs."
— Terry Pratchett, foreword on The Colour of Magic.

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 (sex unknown), 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, and eventually ended up at Urban Fantasy. 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. Villains have included sociopathic geniuses, Eldritch Abominations, and the Auditors of Reality, cosmic bureaucrats who consider life too untidy to be tolerated.

There are forty-one books in the series, six of them young adult, as well as several short stories. There are also Discworld calendars, diaries, maps, compendia, three Video Games,note  five Board Games,note  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 three (technically four, 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. A police procedural based around the Ankh-Morpork Watch is in the works, and discussions are underway for cinema films of Mort and The Wee Free Men. There is also a cookbook.

Since Pratchett's passing in 2015, his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, has taken over the management of the Discworld series. This primarily involves overseeing adaptations (potential and realized) based on Discworld entities, such as the BBC America series based on the City Watch, to which she was briefly attached as a co-writer, although she has since publicly distanced herself from the series and stated it is an In Name Only adaptation. She has stated publicly that the Discworld series belonged to her father, and him alone, and as such, she has no desire to write more novels in the setting, nor allow anyone else to do so.

See also the character sheet for details on the more major of the series' large cast, and the fan-run L-Space Web for quotes and annotations (which unfortunately hasn't been updated since Going Postal, from 2004). There is a reading order guide◊ for those who would like to go through the books by internal series chronology.

The work of collecting book annotations has been continued on the L-Space Wiki, who have picked up the baton and assembled a catalogue of annotations for all Discworld novels since Going Postal, in the hoped-for event that the L-Space Web proper resumes full operations again. New contributors are always welcome!

The Discworld series was pre-dated by a science-fiction novel entitled Strata. While this isn't a Discworld book per se, it does prominently feature a flat Earth, and it does seem to contain the seeds of many ideas that would feature in the Discworld books later on. Good Omens, cowritten by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, also featured a version of Death strikingly similar to the Discworld Death (right down to the blue eyes and THE VOICE), and had a similar overall tone, but took place on plain old Earth.

Warning: Some of the summaries contain spoilers.

List of Discworld Literature

    open/close all folders 

    Main Novel Series 

The main Discworld novels, in order of release. Brackets denote date of UK publication and main character(s) — standalone indicates that it is not part of a series. note 

Illustrated novels:

  • Eric (illustrated by Josh Kirby) (1990 — Rincewind; also available in paperback novel format)
  • The Last Hero (illustrated by Paul Kidby) (2001 — Rincewind, bits of The City Watch and Wizards, Heroes; republished with more illustrations)

The young-adult Discworld novels:

    Other Books and Writings 

Compilations:

  • The Witches Trilogy (Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, and Witches Abroad in one volume, 1995, UK)
  • The Death Trilogy (Mort, Reaper Man, and Soul Music in one volume, 1998, UK)
  • The City Watch Trilogy (Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, and Feet of Clay in one volume, 1999, UK)
  • Rincewind The Wizzard (The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Sourcery, and Eric in one volume, 1999, US)
  • The Gods Trilogy (Pyramids, Small Gods, and Hogfather in one volume, 2000, UK)
  • The Rincewind Trilogy (Sourcery, Eric, and Interesting Times in one volume, 2001, UK)

Children's books:

Short stories note :

The Mapps

  • The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Stephen Player) (1993)
    • The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide (with Discworld Emporium staff, illustrated by Peter Dennis) (updated version of The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, 2012)
    • The Ankh-Morpork Map for iPad (fully zoomable and animated with achievements and narrated walking tours)
  • The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Stephen Player) (1995)
    • The Compleat Discworld Atlas (with Discworld Emporium staff, illustrated by Peter Dennis) (updated version of The Discworld Mapp, 2015)
    • The Mappa Discworld (by Ian Mitchell, illustrated by Marc Moureau) (artistic rendition of the map, as opposed to the Atlas's more Ordinance Survey version, 2022)
  • A Tourist's Guide To Lancre (with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby) (1998)
  • Death's Domain (with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby) (1999)

Other:

  • The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs) (1994). Universe Compendium. Second edition as The Discworld Companion Updated (1997); third edition as The New Discworld Companion (2003), fourth edition as Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion ... So Far (2012), fifth edition as The Ultimate Discworld Companion (2021).
  • Quizbooks The Unseen University Challenge (1996) and The Wyrdest Link: Terry Pratchett's Discworld Quizbook (2014), by David Langford.
  • The Science of Discworld I-IV (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) (1999, 2002, 2005, 2013)
  • Nanny Ogg's Cookbook (with Tina Hannan and Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby) (2002)
  • The Discworld Almanack (with Bernard Pearson) (2004)
  • The Art of Discworld (with Paul Kidby) (2004)
  • Discworld Diary datebooks (1998-2015): calendar-books seeded with original content about various Discworld institutions (the Watch, the University, the Guilds, the Igors, etc) that has made them highly sought-after by collectors.
    • The Ankh-Morpork Archive Vol 1 (2019): The information from the UU, Post Office, Thieves and Assassins Diaries, assembled and republished without the actual diaries.
    • The Ankh-Morpork Archive Vol 2 (2020): As above, but from the Watch, Fools, Reformed Vampires, and History Monks.
  • The Folklore of Discworld (with Jaqueline Simpson) (2008)
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld (quotations; compiled by Stephen Briggs) (2009)
  • Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook to Travelling Upon the Ankh-Morpork & Sto Plains Hygienic Railway (with Discworld Emporium staff, illustrated by Peter Dennis) (2014)

For other Discworld media, see the Franchise page.

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 five-eighths of the tropes on this site would be listed):

    open/close all folders 

    Tropes A to D 
  • Absurdly Dedicated Worker: If not attended, golems will continue carrying out their last order indefinitely, potentially causing huge property damage. Other characters have mused that this is their approach to protest.
  • Absurdly Elderly Mother:
    • Downplayed with Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, who is in her very late forties at least before she has her first child. She ends up having serious complications during the childbirth, though both she and the baby fully recover.
    • The witch Nanny Ogg continued to have children well into her fifties; it is noted that this is not unusual for women in her rural homeland, for reasons that aren't explained.
  • Absurdly Long Stairway: The Unseen University's Tower of Art is 800ft tall and along the inside edge of the building are some (very old and infirm) steps which spiral upwards and number 8,888.note  Several wizard traditions require senior wizards climb those steps, then spend five minutes being out of breath and wheezing. There may be something supposed to happen after this, but since most UU wizards are elderly and overweight, few ever get enough puff back to carry them out. They still climb the spiral steps though, because it is tradition.
  • Absurdly Sharp Blade:
    • Death's scythe and sword. 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.
    • Carrot's sword is also very interesting. It is one of the very few swords on the Disc without a single hint of magic in it, making it more real than anything it tries to cut. Instead, it is a long and very sharp piece of metal designed specifically to cut through man, horse, and armour. It is also an extremely old sword. This makes sense, given its implied origin.
  • Academy of Adventure: If the Unseen University doesn't have adventure happen to it, the wizards will make one (usually by accident).
  • Accidental Suicide: The Ankh-Morpork City Watch have a category labeled "Suicide" for some deaths, usually listed in the police report alongside the lesser offence of "Being Bloody Stupid", to conclude reports on the deaths of people who behaved in such spectacularly stupid and heedless fashion as to precipitate their own deaths. A typical Suicide might involve somebody walking into the hardest pub in town, announcing themself as "Vincent The Invulnerable", and challenging anyone to prove them wrong. A close second might be the vampire who took a job in a pencil factory.
  • Achievements in Ignorance: Due to the unique, wafer-thin nature of the Disc's reality, people can easily accomplish a task simply by not knowing it's impossible, or at the very least not acknowledging it is really hard. This is how Bloody Stupid Johnson's career (for a given value of career) in architecture worked. His sheer stupidity actually warped reality. That, and the fact there were no end of suckers willing to let him build things.
  • 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 replaces alcohol with cigars.
    • On the more psychological level, Vimes has channeled his obsessive tendencies into policing and detective work. He's even lampshaded this, saying that what he needs is a support group where he can stand up and say, "My name is Sam and I'm a really suspicious bastard."
  • Adventure-Friendly World: The Disc starts out as one of these (or a light-hearted parody of one), and then undergoes a gradual Genre Shift as the map gets filled in and it becomes a setting in its own right.
  • Aerith and Bob: Unusual names like Rincewind, Havelock and Eskarina exist besides "normal" ones like Sam, Henry and Tiffany.
    • There are also some weird naming traditions in the Ramtops, giving you names like Yodel Lightly, King My-God-He's-Heavy the First, and Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling of Lancre.
    • Any number of plain old Ankh-Morpork citizens have names like Findthee Swing or Legitimate First. (Can't blame a mother for being proud.)
    • Traditional Omnian names like Smite-the-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments and Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets
    • In Interesting Times, the five ruling families of the Agatean empire are the Hongs, the Sungs, the Tangs, the Fangs, and the McSweenys. This is lampshaded twice.
    • Even the nonhumans' naming conventions took a while to get established, with incongruities like dwarfs named Bjorn and Fruntkin, or a troll in Moving Pictures choosing "Rock" as a film pseudonym, despite this being a racist term for his species.
    • The Nac Mac Feegle don't have many names, so often several brothers in a tribe have to share the name. Say, "Jock". There is "Wee Jock", "Medium Sized Jock", and "Bigger than Wee Jock but not as big as Medium Sized Jock Jock", who gets offended if you shorten his name.
    • One-Man-Bucket, short for One Man Pouring A Bucket Of Water Over Two Dogs, and his unfortunate elder twin brother, Two Dogs F-something other than fighting.
    • Then there's poor Moist, whose name isn't even normal for Discworld, going by the fact that he's heard a lot of jokes about it.
  • Afraid of Clowns: This phobia is deliberately cultivated as part of the background to everyday life in Ankh-Morpork, where Clowns, Fools, Minstrels, Jesters and Troubadors are a recognized Guild and considered to be both sinister and abjectly unfunny.
  • The Afterafterlife: The Nac Mac Feegle believe that they are already in some form of the Afterlife (they consider it to be a Warrior Heaven), reasoning that this world is so great, being full of things to fight, steal and drink, that they must have been very good in their previous lives and this one is their reward. When the Nac Mac Feegle die here they go back to the world they came from, which they believe is rather dull.
  • Afterlife Angst: Subverted for the most part, as the narration explains that since the dead people very quickly realize by looking down at their own body, there's a sense of relief that "the other cosmic shoe had dropped". That, and without a brain and glands, they don't really have the emotions to feel anything, and most fade away to... somewhere.
  • Afterlife of Service:
    • At the end of Men at Arms, the wreckage of the gonne is slipped into Cuddy's casket so he'll have a weapon with which to face the afterlife.
    • Pyramids: Ptraci is a dancing girl meant to be sacrificed to serve Teppic's father in the afterlife, but after Teppic convinces her not to take poison, she breaks out of the mindset and ends up ruling the country. His father's ghost is quite glad she wasn't sacrificed, because Ptraci is his daughter and her singing is such that the world seems a better place once she stops.
    • Inverted with Crusty Caretaker Albert (formerly Alberto Malich), once a powerful wizard, who hit on the idea of performing a Death-summoning rite backwards to keep Death away from him. Instead it summoned him directly to Death's domain, where he now lives forever as Death's manservant (with a few days off every now and then to buy necessities like soap).
  • Alien Geometries:
    • One of the more disturbing features of the Unseen University Library is the way the dome of the Library is always overhead, no matter how far you seem to move on the floor in any direction. This is compounded by the fact that shelves of books, and occasional people among the shelves of books, are also clearly visible on the ceiling around the dome.
    • The Tower of Bugarup University is about 20 feet tall on the inside, or as seen from the bottom — but at the top, it's about half a mile tall.
    • Unseen University itself is so afflicted with this trope that it has a faculty position entitled Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map Folding, whom the others can consult if they need to find another staff member's office.
    • The floor of the temple of the Ichor God Bel-Shammaroth is covered in perfectly tessellating octagons, something which is impossible in any universe which adheres to euclidian or euclidian-adjacent conventions of geometry.
    • Bloody Stupid Johnson has this as his stock in trade, due mainly to his utter inability to perform basic math (when combined with the Disc's shaky reality). He has designed flat triangles with three right angles, a circle for which pi was precisely 3 (breaking space-time in the process), and laid out an apartment complex for which the various doorways and windows don't necessarily open out onto the garden of the same building in which they're set.
  • All-Accessible Magic: In theory, some wizard spells could be cast by anyone, but this is not widely known, partly because wizards keep it quiet, and partly because people who attempt it without a true magic user's ability to sense what they're doing tend to end up dead. The dragon-summoning spell in Guards! Guards!, for example, is a powerful magical working that can be done by a group of random people once they get ahold of some enchanted objects to use as "fuel" and a leader who knows what he's doing. While witches generally shape magic into the required effect by feel, some folkloric rituals count as witch magic, and the reason they don't normally work for most people is simply that the folklore version misses necessary details.
  • All of Time at Once: Ankh-Morpork seems to exist in a range of time periods ranging from the medieval (in the early books as a parody of Medieval European Fantasy) to the Victorian (Unseen University working along college rules, the semaphores standing in for the telegraph). The fact that they exist simultaneously (for example, a groundbreaking theater called the Dysk and a huge opera house existing in the same lifetime) is explained by the History Monks doing their best to fix history every time there's a Time Crash.
  • All Witches Have Cats: Nanny Ogg has Greebo; Granny Weatherwax eventually has You. Tiffany's family has the cat Ratbag, although it loathes her (and the feeling is mutual).
  • All Theories Are True: Especially the morphogenic field, and anything involving the word "quantum".
  • 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.
    • The legend of trolls turning into stone during the day is based on the fact that trolls are nocturnal: their brains are silicon-based and easily overheat, leading both to torpor and stupidity and startling intelligence under the right circumstances.
      • To wit, Detritus is once trapped in a freezer and slowly freezes to death. Just before he loses consciousness, he writes an equation in the condensation which explains the origin of life in its entirety. However, when the door is opened, the rush of warm air gets rid of the condensation and the formula. He is also once taken to the Klatchian desert and can barely move during the day.
      • Diamond trolls are capable of regulating their own internal temperature and are known for being extremely bright. Mr. Shine is an example of this.
    • Also a major reason for the conflict between trolls and dwarfs: "Dwarfs are beings who spend most of their time digging through rock to find precious minerals. Trolls are essentially metamorphic rock wrapped around valuable minerals."
    • Gargoyles are a subspecies of Troll. Their jaws are permanently stuck open, and they like to hang out on tall buildings as their primary foodstuff is pigeons (unlike regular trolls, who eat rocks). They're perfectly at home spending days on end staring at nothing.
    • A troll's physiology also seems to represent the place it was born. Though most trolls have solid mountainous physiques, there's also Chalky (implied to come from chalk plains) and Brick (who was born in the city).
  • Alternative Number System:
    • Trolls apparently have a "base Many" system (actually base four). As in, "one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two..."
      • "...many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS."
    • Of course this isn't how such a system would actually work, as it would be like counting "eight, nine, nine-one, nine-two..." It should actually follow "one, two, three, many, one-one, one-two, one-three, one-many, two-one...".
    • In one book, Detritus appears to be counting in base-2 (binary). This makes sense, given that a troll's brain is made of silicon (like a computer chip).
  • Amalgamated Individual: The gods of the Discworld are created by belief, and because humans tend to work along similar lines (the Top God is always going to be a Grandpa God with a beard because that's how a five year old sees his father), a single god can be in several different pantheons at once: the Fertility Goddess has a lot of wigs and a padded bra, Blind Io (a combination of Zeus, Odin and Thor) has a dozen different hammers with which to cause thunder and is the only god able to do that (although every god can bring down lightning bolts).
  • Amusing Alien: The Luggage.
  • An Aesop: The books have an overall message that treating people as objects is the source of sin. Whether it's reducing their humanity, denying its existence, or trying to excuse propaganda towards them, such actions are monstrous and the source of all evil. It's said as much in Carpe Jugulum, which says that there's no such thing as Grey-and-Gray Morality, just "white that's gotten grubby" over time when good people have to do bad things. And people keep coming up with justifications for why they have to Shoot the Dog because "they're getting worried that they won't like the truth" once they arrive at the end of that thought.
  • Ancestral Name: In The Compleat Discworld Atlas, we're told that a polite greeting to a Nothingfjord chieftain involves going back about forty generations, and most of them are called Eric.
  • Angels, Devils and Squid: Gods, demons, and the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions. The first two groups are more similar than they'd like to admit ("the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters"), while the Things just want the light and shape of our reality and would kill us without even noticing if they ever got through. That's without mentioning the Auditors and other weirdness.
    • Thief of Time has a scene where pictures of particularly dangerous entities are shown. The picture of the most feared of all shows... an empty, hooded robe, hanging in mid-air. That's how Auditors appear. Angels and Demons have uses for humans. The Things From The Dungeon Dimensions would eradicate humans without noticing. Auditors are the only ones who are actually malevolent: they not only actively want to eradicate life, they want it to never have existed.
  • Animal-Vehicle Hybrid: The God of Evolution spends his time tinkering with the natural world in order to innovate and improve pre-existing designs. The Wizards of Unseen University are consternated to see one of his improvements to the common elephant involves putting it on wheels, as these would be so much more efficient for such a massive animal than legs. Life is a learning curve for even a God: he soon realises a prerequisite for a wheeled elephant would be a completely flat smooth Veldt with no inconvenient rocky bits with sharp edges, and that ain't going to happen yet. The God gloomily concedes that the design needs stronger wheels with thicker tyres and some sort of puncture repair kit.
  • Annoying Background Event: Lord Vetinari's antechamber has a specially designed clock that ticks irregularly. By the time he lets his visitors in, they're severely stressed by the unrewarded anticipation of a tick that always come a fraction of a second too late or too early.
  • "Arabian Nights" Days: Klatch is Arabian Nights Days in Sourcery, the first book Klatchians play a major part in, but by the time Jingo rolls around it's more of a late-19th/early-20th-century Lawrence of Arabia style Middle East, with a few Arabian Nights elements left in.
  • Arc Number: 8. The Discworld has eight seasons and eight-day weeks, and its spectrum has eight colours (though only magically gifted people can see octarine). An eighth son of an eighth son becomes a wizard, and wizards themselves must never speak that number's name aloud for fear of extradimensional payback. There are eight Muses and eight circles of Hell. The Tower of Art at the Unseen University has 8,888 steps (more or less). There's a magic-sensitive metal called octiron and a magical gas called octogen.
    • Moving Pictures contains one of the later references, with the passing grade for Unseen University exams being 88.
    • In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, eight rats with their tails knotted together make up the Rat King, Spider.
    • In the second Science of Discworld, Ridcully demonstrates that magic is ineffective on Roundworld by saying "Eight!" aloud a few times, then hauling Rincewind out from under the table to show him that, no, nothing disastrous happened because of it.
    • For the Auditors, three is a preferred number, because when three of them work together, each one can be monitored by the other two.
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: While there are 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 frequently employed trope.
  • Axis Mundi: The Hub of the Disc is the ten-mile-high mountain Cori Celesti. It's both the Home of the Gods and the focal point of the Disc's Background Magic Field, hence why Magic Compasses point towards it.
  • Badass Normal:
    • The watchman Sam Vimes. So threatening is he that the crime rate actually drops when Vimes leaves the city, since the criminal underworld knows what he'll do if it rises while he's away.
    • The Chessmaster Havelock Vetinari is only very rarely taken by surprise. Everything else is either a plan of his or the results of one of his plans. The city cannot function without him.
    • Cohen and the Silver Horde, a band of octogenarian barbarians. They're completely normal human beings who got very good at staying alive, and simply never dropped the habit.
  • Bad Guy Bar:
    • The Mended Drum (originally the Broken Drum — "you can't beat it"). Originally a seedy bar in the mould of the Wild West, and as such a favoured haunt of the Disc's many Heroes. In today's more congenial age, barfights at the Mended Drum are staged contests and severed limbs are carefully numbered so they can be surgically reattached.
    • Biers, the bar for the differently-alive, including vampires, zombies, werewolves, bogeymen, ghouls, and various others too weird to fit in anywhere else. And one Mrs. Gammage: a nearly blind, dotty old woman who started visiting the pub when it was named the Crown and Axe, and hasn't even noticed that the normal clientele has been replaced by the... er, differently-normal. (She is, incidentally, a very safe dotty old lady; the regulars have apparently adopted her as a sort of unofficial mascot, and at least a couple of thieves who robbed her subsequently turned up without a drop of blood left in their bodies...)
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: In Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Nanny Ogg remarks that a woman who wants to keep hold of her man should become proficient in "those arts which will keep a weak-willed man from straying" — and learning to cook will also be useful.
  • Banishing Ritual:
    • The classic banishing ritual at the end of the Rite of Ash'Kente, which summons Death, begins "Begone, foul fiend". DEATH has asked for this to be replaced with something less personally offensive.
    • When the Lancre witches summon a demon to whom they ask the traditional three questions, the malevolent entity hangs around at the end and diffidently points out he hasn't been properly banished yet, so would they mind awfully? The youngest, Magrat Garlick, is given the dogsbody task by the older witches. Nanny Ogg, a very down-to-earth witch, personally considers the best banishing ritual of all the words "BUGGER OFF!" spoken with force and authority.
    • Rincewind the Wizzard has learnt that hand gestures count in magical spellcasting. The unspoken banishing ritual is a dread sign made with the right hand, involving the raised middle finger jerked upwards. This binds all entities and they have no choice other than to withdraw to their own chthonic plane of existence by the shortest possible route.
    • A wizard called Albert tried to permanently banish Death from his presence, making himself immortal, by performing the Rite of Ash'Kente in reverse. Instead it teleported him to Death's house, where he got a job as his manservant.
  • Battle Butler: Quite literally, with Sam Vimes' butler Willikins. Both in the sense that he temporarily leaves the household for military service in Jingo (and proved quite ferocious as a sergeant, both in and out of battle), and in Thud! he turns up as a Special Constable, and takes down two of the three Dwarf assassins without thinking about it, despite the fact that they surprised him by coming directly through the wall. Sam thinks how comforting it is at times like that to have a butler who can throw a common fish knife so hard it is extremely difficult to remove from the wall. He's also glad that the different street gangs they were in as kids had a treaty, so he never had to face Willikins in a rumble.
    Willikins: A cap with sharpened pennies sewn to the brim.
    Vimes: You could take an eye out with that!
    Willikins: With care, sir, yes.
  • Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Like many Police Procedurals, the City Watch stories never make it easy to collect information.
  • Bearded Baby: In canonical artwork, all Dwarves are depicted as having beards — even babies in arms. Dwarfs on the Discworld, like their mothers and fathers, are born with beards. See here.◊
  • "Begone" Bribe:
    • The modus operandi of the Beggars' Guild.
    • Sometimes literally; Coffin Henry wanders around with a sign that reads "for sum muny I wunt folo you home".
  • Being Human Sucks: The orangutan Librarian of the Unseen University is much happier with his form after a magical accident and has taken precautions to prevent the wizards from making him human again.
  • Berserk Button:
    • For the love of God, don't say the M-word near the Librarian.
    • Or call Granny Weatherwax a Crone, a Hag...
      • ... or an old woman.
      • Or, worst of all, address her as "Miss" rather than "Mistress".
    • Or try to take Rincewind's hat away. Or any other wizard's.
  • Beware the Nice Ones:
    • Mustrum Ridcully and the wizards of UU may look like harmless, slightly overweight, cheerful old men. The entire purpose of UU is to keep them that way so they don't destroy the world. Before the University made magic and academic life pleasant, the plural of "wizard" was "war".
      • The Librarian also seems like a genial and harmless half-deflated inner tube, until someone says the M-word...
    • Nanny Ogg is generally much nicer than Granny Weatherwax, which is why people tend to seek her out for help when they need it. She is, however, every bit as cunning and manipulative as Granny, if not more so. Pratchett himself hinted that Nanny may be even more powerful than Granny, but is smart enough not to show it.
    • Subverted in short story "The Sea and Little Fishes"; Granny Weatherwax suddenly starts being nice to everyone — which, naturally, makes them deeply suspicious.
    • Death is pretty congenial, and does his job sensibly while trying to understand humanity as much as possible (even if most of the time he doesn't really get it). But if you threaten the nature of reality, seriously threaten his granddaughter Susan (which is pretty hard to do in the first place), or try to mess up his part of the universe, you had better start running like Rincewind and never stop running! He gets emotional over kittens as well.
    • And then, of course, there's Rule One: "Do not act incautiously when dealing with small, bald, smiling, wrinkled, apparently harmless old men!"
    • Carrot Ironfoundersson. More than once, the poster boy of goodness (to the point you imagine him with baby-smooth skin and living in the 1950s USA), has made others realize this about him.
  • Beta Couple: Played with sometimes in the City Watch books, where there are two Official Couples: Vimes/Sybil and Carrot/Angua. Exactly which is the Beta Couple depends on the book: Vimes/Sybil are pretty clearly the Betas in Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Fifth Elephant, but Thud! sees a reversal of the situation that's looking pretty permanent. Even so, a number of books in the sequence (Guards! Guards! and Night Watch) avert this altogether by not having Angua appear in them.
  • Bewitched Amphibians: Wizards in the series sometimes do this, such as Alberto Malich towards an innkeeper in Mort. Meanwhile, in Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax prefers to simply make the victim think they've been transformed, which is technically less cruel but a lot more entertaining, and wears off after a few days.
  • BFG: Detritus of the Watch wields a siege crossbow, converted to fire bundles of arrows at speeds which tear them into millions of extremely fast-moving flaming splinters. It can remove doors from their frames, their houses, and the world of objects larger than a matchstick, and is once described as the only breaching weapon which can forcibly open the front and rear doors of a large building at the same time. The only safe place to be when Detritus fires it is a hundred feet or more behind him.
  • Bigot with a Badge: "Mayonnaise" Quirke (he's rich, thick, and smells of eggs) is a watchman introduced as "the kind of person who spells negro with two 'g's." While intra-human racism isn't as big a problem on the Disc, Quirke is clearly the type to abuse his authority at any opportunity.
  • Bilingual Animal: Recurring character Gaspode the Wonder Dog learned to speak Morporkian (i.e. English) via magic, but has no trouble speaking to other dogs, or even wolves. On several occasions, he acts as a cross-species translator.
  • Bilingual Conversation:
    • Any conversation with the Unseen University's librarian (an orangutan). His vocabulary is limited to "Oook" with varying punctuation, but everyone seems to know exactly what he means.
    • The Death of Rats also. Squeak.
  • Bizarre Alien Senses: Golems, or at least Mr. Pump, are sensitive to something called "Karmic Signature", which Pump did not see fit to explain. They can also detect one another "singing" underground, through thousands of feet of soil.
  • Blemished Beauty: This is the trademark of Igorinas, who have the same DIY approach to self-improvement as their brothers. Except for the fact they place a far greater emphasis on the cosmetic and aesthetic aspects of their trade. The typical Igorina is usually stunningly beautiful and pleasing to the eye in almost all respects. But she will also deliberately carry one visible imperfection, usually carefully exaggerated, so as to indicate this is not accidental. Otherwise, Igorina argues: "Who'll be able to tell I'm an Igorina ?"
  • Bolt of Divine Retribution: Gods tend to throw these at people who annoy them, particularly atheists.
    A bolt of lighting lanced through the clouds and hit Dorfl's helmet. There was a sheet of flame and then a trickling noise. Dorfl's molten armor formed puddles around his white-hot feet.
    "I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument"
  • Book Ends: The Colour Of Magic, the first Discworld novel, features the first foreign tourist's visit to Ankh-Morpork. Raising Steam, the last mainstream novelnote  in the series published before Terry Pratchett's death, features the introduction of the steam train to Ankh-Morpork, which makes tourist excursions to and from the city available to pretty much anyone.
  • Books That Bite: The magic books inside the Unseen University's Library have to be chained to their shelves. Sourcery describes a few of the books. The Necrotelicomnocon is bound in iron plates, the Guide to Levitation has been floating in the rafters for about a hundred and fifty years, and the Booke of Forbidden Sex Majyk is kept in a deep-frozen room and should only be read if you are over the age of 80 and, if possible, dead.
    • To make matters worse, the books, apart from a fair number of them being able to rip the skin from your bones, they can read each other and learn methods to kill you with everything from magic to a door handle. There's a very good reason why the students only venture into the library in large numbers (or scouting expeditions).
    • The Octavo, the creator's own grimoire, is so powerful that it can overload the most powerful anti-magic spell in existence and change reality.
  • Boy Meets Girl: A common feature near the beginning of the various 'series,' usually leading to an Official Couple in later books.
  • Brawn Hilda: Vimes' wife, Sybil Ramkin, right from her first appearance in Guards! Guards!. In that one, some Palace Guards come to take her to be eaten by the dragon. She takes exception to being dragged off by a load of guards... with a broadsword. It doesn't work out for her, but two of her pets (Sam Vimes and a most peculiar young male swamp dragon) rescue her later on. It is noted on several occasions, as recently as Snuff, that Sybil is descended from the kind of old aristocracy that kept its place by being more than able to defend themselves. Hence why even in Night Watch a younger Sybil grabs a ornamental sword (or something else long and metal?) to defend herself when (stranger to her at that time) Vimes comes to the door. There were previous references to the martial activities of Sybil's male ancestors, usually in the context of her even tougher female ancestors looking after everything else, including caring for whatever portions of their male relatives made it back from battle. As well, given the later references to the family apparently never throwing anything away if it could possibly have any use, there's no reason to think that sword wasn't entirely functional. (Given how badly she handles a sword in the chronologically later events of Guards! Guards! she probably didn't know how to use it, but that's not important when you consider the kind of help the family tends to hire and the fact that her father might well have been home.)
  • Brick Joke: Happens quite often, even across books in the form of Continuity Nods.
    • 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.
    • A bar called The Broken Drum (You Can't Beat It!) burns down in the first book. It appears rebuilt subsequently throughout later books as The Mended Drum (You Can Get Beaten).
    • Invariably, a remark about anyone with "eyes like gimlets" will lead to the other party asking "what, you mean that dwarf who runs the delicatessen on Cable Street?" It isn't until the nineteenth novel, Feet of Clay, that we learn there really is a dwarf named Gimlet and that he is well-known for his piercing glare.
    • Similarly, due to widespread illiteracy in Discworld, there have been kings capable of turning whatever they touch into glod and at least one princess cursed to spin straw in glod. Glod is, in fact, the name of a notoriously short-tempered dwarf—short-tempered mostly because various kings and princesses keeps summoning clones of him into being without warning.
    • In Men at Arms, Angua mentions in passing that Big Fido thinks that all wolves have names like Quickfang and Silverback, and laughs it off. We find out in Feet of Clay that the full names of her parents are Baron Guye von Uberwald, aka (Silvertail), and Seraphine Soxe-Blumberg, aka (Yellowfang). Of course, they are family of (werewolves), so....
      • Though in The Fifth Elephant, we're told that most true wolves don't have names, so much as descriptions. Gaspode attempts to translate one of these for the rather prudish Captain Carrot. They eventually settle on "Bum", which Carrot can choose to interpret in the way common in the US (vagrant, tramp, hobo) while remaining at least somewhat similar to the more precise translation "Arsehole".
    • Another one crops up in Night Watch. In The Truth, one of the newspaper headlines is "CITTY's BIGGEST CAKE MIX-Up!!!". It's a story about a cart carrying several tons of flour overturning and causing a cart carrying a cartload of eggs to overturn, which in turn causes a cart carrying 30 churns of milk to overturn... Anyway, in Night Watch, after Vimes destroys a certain siege engine, we find out that it is not the biggest cake mix-up after all. As one of people who ordered the siege engine sent against Vimes: "Those oxen were really feisty, sir."
    • There's a passing mention of some cheeses having put up a fight when the elves attacked an inn in Lords and Ladies. This sounds like a joke, until Wintersmith introduces Horace the Cheese...
    • In Moving Pictures, C. M. O. T. Dibbler orders a thousand elephants for a production that never gets made. In The Compleat Discworld Atlas we are told that many menageries in the Circle Sea region now mysteriously contain far more elephants than they used to; recently-discovered documents indicate that a Mr. Dibbler is implicated.
    • One-book Lampshaded example: In Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, head Assassin Lord Downey's recipe for peppermints includes arsenic among its ingredients, and repeated admonitions to leave the arsenic out, among its instructions. Later, an illustration in the Etiquette section about death shows a rat nibbling a peppermint while the Death Of Rats leans over it, captioned "We really mean it about the arsenic".
  • Bungling Inventor:
    • Bloody Stupid Johnson, whose works tend to warp reality when they're not outright useless. It is suggested that he possessed a form of inverse genius; not stupidity, but a form of intelligence that equated to genius in the opposite direction. His works include the Colossus of Ankh-Morpork, which fits in a pocket, an exploding sundial, a Portal Network apartment complex, a tower built with quicksand (it'd be built faster), several pipe organs, a shower that combines with a pipe organ and a geyser, a mail-sorting machine that receives letters from alternate universes, an ornamental cruet set capable of housing several families, a manicure device better suited to peeling potatoes... Quite impressively, he managed to create an explosive out of nothing but sand and water. A particularly good example being that garden of Patrician's palace, which includes:
      • A trout pond that, due to a mix-up with measurements, is one hundred fifty feet long, one inch wide, and home to just the one trout.
      • A beehive large enough to house 10-foot long bees.
      • A chiming sundial that explodes around noon.
      • A fountain that, when turned on, groaned ominously for five minutes and then fired a cherub a thousand feet into the air.
      • Cast iron garden furniture that has been known to melt on hot days.
      • A maze so small that people get lost looking for it.
      • Crazy paving that has committed suicide.
      • The "Ho-Ho", which is like a ha-ha (a ditch that hides a fence) but much much deeper, and has to date claimed three gardeners.
        "To Bloody Stupid Johnson, scale was something that happened to other people."
        "If you wanted a small ground-to-air missile, you just asked him to make an ornamental fountain."
    • Completely inverted with Leonard of Quirm, who invents, among other things, incredibly destructive siege engines as intellectual exercises, including cutting instructions and parts lists, a working submarine and spacecraft and what is hinted to be an atomic bomb.
    • Ned Simnel in Reaper Man, who repeatedly fails to recongize what should be a "Eureka!" Moment, and who we later learn in Raising Steam eventually perished in one of his experiments.
  • Butlerspace: Igors from Discworld are explicitly able to instantly appear right behind their masters when called. One even goes so far as to set a beartrap behind him as a test, but the Igor gets around it, being no stranger to "masters of an inquiring mind" - although the one who liked to do this at the edge of cliffs was pushing it.
  • Butt-Monkey:
    • Rincewind, obviously.
    • Less obviously, Lord Vetinari, although to a lesser extent. He gets overthrown by a dragon and thrown into his own dungeon, gets shot, is turned into a lizard, gets poisoned, has to spend time in a submarine with Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs and pretends to be a street performer before being arrested, is knocked into a coma to be replaced by a fake version of himself, and on top of all this has to make sure that the city runs as it should while defeating the woman who writes the crossword for the Times.
    • The Bursar, usually. In any novel where the wizards appear for long, he's likely to be the bystander who catches the friendly-fire flack.
    • The Thieves' Guild Yearbook and Diary introduces a self-invoked example: Mr. Echinoid Blacksly, founder and sole member of the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Victims. He hires himself out to be robbed, mugged, or burgled in his clients' stead, as per the Thieves' Guild's pre-arranged appointment schedule.
  • Candlelit Ritual:
    • Parodied with the Rite of AshkEnte, which summons Death. The full Ritual takes lots of large candles, rare incense, a ceremonial octogram, and whatnot — and it's all set dressing used by self-important wizards to lend some gravitas to something that can be done with three bits of wood and a couple drops of mouse blood. Later in the series it's pared down to two bits of wood and a fresh egg.
    • When Magrat mentions ceremonial candles to the other witches in Wyrd Sisters, she gets a blank look and Nanny points out she's got a perfectly good oil lamp, thanks.
    • Wizards in general are kind of obsessive about the importance dribbly candles have to the look of magic, to the point that they won't use a fresh candle until the University's team of skilled candle dribblers have been to work on it.
  • Canis Latinicus: Latatian, most of the time.
  • Cannot Cross Running Water: Occasionally discussed, with regard to witches and wizards, but apparently averted in truth. Supposedly true for the undead, though Windle Poons manages it in Reaper Man. It's noted, however, that the Ankh river barely qualifies as "running" or "water" after passing through the city.
  • Cats Are Magic: Death is very fond of cats and gives them all nine lives. That said, the only cat who is really magical is Maurice, from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. He gained sapience and speech by eating a rat who had, in turn, also eaten some magical garbage.
  • Cat Stereotype: Granny Weatherwax's cat You is a pure white kitten, full of purity and innocence. Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo, on the other hand, is grey, and is older, wiser, and pure malevolent evil.
    • Inverted: Greebo is actually afraid of You since their first meeting. Note well, the only other creatures that Greebo has ever feared were a Nac Mac Feegle and a voodoo deity in the shape of a cockerel.
  • Caught in the Bad Part of Town: Whenever a character finds themselves in The Shades, (the most infamous and crime ridden slum in the city of Ankh-Morpork) it's essentially a countdown (usually a very short one) until multiple crooks try to mug or kill them.
  • Cerebus Rollercoaster: The series has gotten darker and more mature over the years, all without quite losing its sense of humor. And yes, Pratchett even plays with this trope, contrasting the dark Monstrous Regiment with the moderately lighthearted Going Postal followed by the dark Thud! followed by the moderately lighthearted Making Money followed by the even more lighthearted Unseen Academicals followed by the pitch black I Shall Wear Midnight...
  • Chalk Outline: Invoked rarely, and only for laughs. For example, the Ankh is the only river in the world you can draw a chalk outline on.
  • Chameleon Camouflage:
    • Susan Sto Helit.
    • Granny Weatherwax.
    • Granny's apprentice Tiffany Aching.
    • Vimes has an uncanny ability to blend neatly into the shadows. A thief the Watch was chasing once stopped in an alley and leaned on him.
    • The Wizards of UU can do this so well that they look more like what they're pretending to be than the real thing does.
  • Characterization Marches On: Unlike giving the wobbly timeline of events an in-universe reason to exist, Pratchett has made less attempts to handwave how several of the longest running characters seem a bit... different in their introductions.
    • Remember when The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork was obese? note 
    • Or when Death seemed to actively cause people to die rather than merely collect their souls?
    • Remember when Granny Weatherwax was just a simple village witch on her own?
    • Or when most wizards were as skinny as Rincewind?
    • Or when Willikins was just a butler? note 
  • Character Catchphrase:
    • Death: There is no justice. Just me.
    • Rincewind: "Oh shit I'm going to die!"
    • Moist: "Trust me."
    • all Igors: "Yeth, marthtar."
    • The Death of Rats: Squeak.
    • The Librarian: "Oook."
    • Vetinari: "Don't let me detain you."
    • Granny Weatherwax: "I aten't dead."
    • Discussed Trope by Vimes and Carrot in Jingo:
    'You know what I always say,' he said.
    Carrot removed his helmet and polished it with his sleeve. 'Yes, sir. "Everyone's guilty of something, especially the ones that aren't," sir.'
    'No, not that one . . .'
    'Er . . . "Always take into consideration the fact that you might be dead wrong," sir?'
    'No, nor that one either.'
    'Er . . . "How come Nobby ever got a job as a watchman?", sir? You say that a lot.'
    'No! I meant "Always act stupid," Carrot.'
    'Ah, right, sir. From now on I shall remember that you always said that, sir.'
    • Commander Vimes is fond of noting that in criminal cases, the motive is easier to find if you "follow the money".
  • 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 Steampunk City of Adventure. It's still a pretty much a Wretched Hive, it's just that everyone is more civilized about it.
      • Can be attributed to Vetinari's own character development, which is enormous. In the first books he cares for the city but not the people in it, turns the watch into a joke and uses bodyguards, uses the dungeon to torture mimes, keeps an innocent if dangerous man locked up and considers killing another, has outlawed the press, tolerates that Trolls are kept as dogs and Golems as property, threatens the guild heads and wizards with death. He called the world a sea of evil with only bad people in it, and hoped for no afterlife. In the later books even the Queen of Faeries know better than to harm his citizens, he elevated the watch and lost the guards, uses the dungeon as a saferoom, gives condemned criminals a chance to atone, is furious when people imply he traded in lives or had someone killed, supports the press, emancipates and integrates species, is friends with the head wizard and the assassins refuse to take a hit on him. Also he avoided a war through strategic surrender, brokered peace between Trolls and Dwarves, and refused to pursue economic dominance via Golems. He states that there should be no slaves, not even to instinct, and that people should be moral superiors to an cruel/uncaring God. Basically he went from The Cynic, Pragmatic Villain and Evil Overlord to Anti-Nihilist, Reasonable Authority Figure and Big Good. He still possibly tortures mimes, though, or at least lets it be known that he's prepared to do so.
    • Somehow the Senior Wrangler became the romantic of the UU faculty, while averting this trope enough to still be interchangeable with the Chair and Lecturer.
    • Vimes started out as a depressive alcoholic, before the development of the Watch led him to discover he actually liked being a policeman when he was allowed to act as one, to the point that by his second appearance, he considered it a stronger addiction than the drink.
    • In the Tiffany books, Roland is introduced in The Wee Free Men as a mildly bratty rich kid, then A Hat Full of Sky describes him as "less of a twit than he had been. On the other hand, there had been such of lot of twit to begin with". Wintersmith builds on his Ship Tease with Tiffany, gives him some angst due to his ailing father and wicked aunts, and even lets him be the hero for a moment. And I Shall Wear Midnight has him become rather stiff and pompous due to the pressures of taking on his father's role, before he unbends again, while firmly sinking the ship.
  • Chess with Death: Although he can never remember the rules.
    Remind me again how the little horse-shaped ones move.
  • Children Do the Housework: It is said that Nanny Ogg has not done a lick of housework since her first daughter was old enough to hold a duster.
  • Chronoscope:
    • The Omni-scopes have the power to do this, although true to form the wizards spend a great deal of time and effort trying to eliminate that capacity, treating it as a bug instead of a feature. It seems all they wanted was an expensive version of a webcam.
      • The problem, it is revealed, is in STEERING the damn things. They tend to start out with random viewing coordinates, so it's very hard to see anything in particular with them. Most of them end up being used as shaving mirrors because almost everywhere they might look is effectively featureless space.
    • Also from the Science of Discworld books, Hex is able to treat our entire universe as one of these. Fast forwarding, or rewinding to see specific spots in human history (our universe canonically exists in a snowglobe on a shelf in the Unseen University, a wobbly shelf).
  • Choosy Beggar: Her position as the leader of Ankh-Morpork's Guild of Beggars forces Queen Molly to be one of these. As it would be unseemly for her to beg simply for a few pennies, a pallet to sleep on, a crust of bread, or bottle of booze, Molly is compelled to ask for a million dollars, a mansion to sleep in, a full banquet, or bottles of fine champagne exclusively. Of course the Beggar's Guild is also one of the richest guilds in the city, so it's likely their Queen has a stipend to augment her income.
  • Circle of Standing Stones: The druids use stone circles as computers, flying them into place (the metaphor is extended by them having to build new ones every few months because the old ones are now obsolete). It being cheaper to build a new 32 megalith circle than upgrade a 16 megalith circle. This causes some friction with trolls (who are giant sentient rocks), who are often picked and dropped off miles away from where they were living.
  • City of Adventure: Ankh-Morpork, the various maneuvering of the Guilds, Wizard experiments, various non-sanctioned criminal enterprises, most recent group of invaders coming in and whatever the nobility goes through to try and keep power causes all types of shenanigans. The books sometimes wax on how they don't have time to go into all the stories happening in the place; the series is about what Pterry finds interesting. The Gurps supplement gets more in-depth about the settings so groups can plot games there easier.
  • City of Everywhere: Again, Ankh-Morpork, a Culture Chop Suey. Some clearly identifiable inspirations that stay prominent in multiple books include 18th to 19th century London and New York City for the economy and culture, Renaissance-era Venice for the system of government, Seattle of all places for the geography and occasionally Paris for a bit of variety. But basically, any time Pratchett felt like doing a Whole-Plot Reference to a work of fiction set in a particular city, he found some way to squeeze the necessary architecture and cultural traditions into Ankh-Morpork somewhere. There's also a lot of Anachronism Stew mixing up eras of the same city; for instance, a Globe style permanent theater was a new and iffy idea that had never been tried before when the city opera house across the street was already centuries old.
  • The City Narrows: The Shades within Ankh-Morpork, where the cops (and criminals) never go for fear of not coming out alive. (Of course that makes it okay for those members of the Watch who aren't technically alive.)
  • Classical Movie Vampire: Played straight with some vampires, such as the old Count in Carpe Jugulum, averted by his descendents in the same book, and played with by other vampires throughout the series. In Literature/Thud Vimes notes that Otto Chriek leans into "music hall vampire" stereotypes to avoid being perceived as the more threatening kind of vampire.
  • Clever Crows:
    • Ravens living around the High-Energy Magic building at Unseen University have developed intelligence beyond their already-clever limits, and view the city panorama below as a sort of daytime entertainment. A couple of them bother gnome constable Buggy Swires on a stakeout, constantly pestering him for details.
    • Quoth the Raven (yeah...) who starts off as a wizard's familiar in Mort, and ends up becoming the steed for the Death of Rats in later books. He advises a number of protagonists and is clearly more level-headed than most characters on the disc.
  • Clique Tour: The eleven-year old Pteppic arrives at the Assassins' Guild School. After a shaky start when he comes to the attention of his housemaster for all the wrong reasons, he is befriended by the savvier Chidder, who takes a shine to him and tells him what to look out for and who to avoid.
  • Clown School: The Fools' Guild, where young men are apprenticed to become court jesters and the like. Depicted as a terrible place where comedy is Serious Business. A Running Gag is to compare the Fools' Guild to the Assassins' Guild, which it is directly next to, and make the Fools' Guild sound worse.
  • Common Tongue: Morporkian, fitting the city's cosmopolitan influence.
  • Comically Inept Healing: The Guild of Barber-Surgeons seem to mostly be this, at least until former Back-Alley Doctor Dr Lawn rises high enough in the profession to make some changes.
  • Concept Album: Steeleye Span's musical version of Wintersmith.
  • Confound Them with Kindness: In the short story "The Sea and the Little Fishes", Granny Weatherwax's reaction to local know-it-all Mrs. Earwig trying to convince her not to participate in the annual Witch Trials is to... become nice. Unnervingly, uncharacteristically nice. Everyone becomes convinced she's secretly plotting something dreadful in revenge, which completely sours the mood of the Witch Trials... which was Granny's plan all along.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu: Narrativium pretty much guarantees this. Pratchett explains this phenomenon by reasoning that the side with numbers has to think before hitting, whereas the hopelessly outnumbered side can just attack anything nearby and be pretty much sure it is an enemy, thus giving them an advantage. This makes sense in Discworld logic.
  • Constructed World: The Discworld develops into an impressively in-depth case, though what certainly helps is that the series never takes itself too seriously so as to tread upon Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
  • Continuity Nod: Pterry generally tries to acknowledge continuity. The events in Thief of Time are used to explain many remaining continuity problems.
  • Corrupt Politician: invoked Subverted by Ephebe. They have the only elected politician on the Disc, a new one is elected every five years on the basis of honesty, and they call him the "Tyrant". It's his actual title.
    • On Fourecks, elected politicians are immediately thrown into jail so to save them, inevitably, having to do so at a later date.
  • Countrystan: Klatchistan serves as the Fantasy Counterpart of Afghanistan.
  • Crafted from Animals: Nac Mac Feegles make plenty of gear from animal parts, but since they are wee people they make use of small animals; rabbit skulls are used as helmets, mouse leather is used for bagpipes, etc.
  • 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 his name has been taken off the register for real assassinations, but 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.
    • The Patrician of Ankh-Morporkh, master of the Batman Gambit who has made himself so indispensible that like Vimes the Assassins (which is, incidentally, where he was trained) have removed him from the register. One of the earliest examples we see if this is in Guards! Guards!, where he is thrown into a cell, which Vimes realises is a) heavily reinforced on the inside, and b) to which Vetinari has the key.
  • Creator Cameo: Pratchett has cameos in all three of the TV movie adaptations to date. Not only that, he speaks the final line of dialogue in all of them.
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus:
    • The religion of Omnianism, which we get to see develop over centuries, clearly parallels Christianity. In the past its adherents were more of the "burn the heretics" type but in modern times the only crusades they go on are door-to-door pamphlet deliveries.
    • Most of the nations of the Disc, in keeping with the standard fantasy setting, practice polytheism, with all the gods coexisting (and even sharing the same mountaintop abode, if they're popular enough). But actual religious practice is very modern: the Church of hammer-wielding thunder god Blind Io is suspiciously Anglican, while immigrants who worship Offler the Crocodile God keep vaguely Hindu-looking art around the house.
    • The History Monks are somewhat Buddhist, while Genuans practice Hollywood Voodoo (though with made-up deities named after supermarket chains).
  • Counting to Potato: Trolls have a counting system based on fours, rather than tens (apart from Detritus, who ends up counting in binary). As a result a troll counting "one, two, three, many"note  comes across this way (leading to an In-Universe stereotype that trolls can't count past three).
  • Dangled by a Giant: When she gets really angry, the young Witch Tiffany Aching physically picks up Rob Anybody of the Nac Mac Feegle and lifts him off the ground to glare him in the eye. Normally on the Discworld this is a shocking breach of good manners and any human other than a Witch is risking some very emphatic correction. But Rob knows he is dealing with a Witch, who stands twelve times his height.
  • De-aged in Death: Spirits looks like how the person sees themselves, which is normally how they appeared in life, but there are exceptions. Mort includes a very elderly witch, whose spirit is an attractive woman in her twenties, which she says is who she always was inside.
  • Deadly Book: The Library of the Unseen University is full of books that do horrible things to people. In particular the Necrotelecomnicon (Written by Achmed the Mad, who preferred to be known as Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches) will drive mad any man who attempts to read it. Fortunately The Librarian isn't a man (but an orangutan) so he has no problem with it.
  • Deadly Dust Storm: The deserts of Klatch have these, to the point where all you need to do to sharpen a sword is hold it in the air for a little.
  • Death from Above:
    • Don't go into wherever the Librarian has chosen as his base of operations if he considers you an enemy. He will generally drop down onto your shoulders and try to unscrew your head.
    • Also a favorite of those Nac mac Feegle who ride large birds. Being both lightweight and nigh-indestructible, they only bother with a parachute if the ground is soft enough that clambering out of the hole they make would be embarrassing.
    • This is the go-to approach of gargoyle assassin Mr. Gryle in Going Postal.
  • 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. Stealth Chess, for example, is a chess variant; Thud! is based on the ancient Norse game of hnefatafl, as befits a game of dwarfs and trolls. For trivia fans: The dwarf name for Thud is Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl (pronounced Hur-naffle-baffle-sniffle-wiffle-taffle) a rather more obvious connection to the Norse game.
    • There are also rules for Cripple Mr. Onion.
    • In the Author's Note from Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett mentions a group of fans who danced the Dark Morris for him in Chicago.
  • Democracy Is Bad: At least the people of Ankh-Morpork think so. Sam Vimes's ancestor "Old Stoneface" assassinated the last Ankh-Morpork king, and tried to introduce democracy but the people voted against it.
  • Destroyer Deity:
    • The novel Hogfather reveals that Death has a special room for the lifetimers belonging to very important personages. There is a very large one with a world-turtle engraved on it, carrying on its shoulders four elephants, which in turn support the entire Discworld. The implication here is that when the day comes for the last of its sand to run through, Death will square his shoulders, lift his scythe, and rise to the task... Soul Music, explores this further, it's Death's job to one day play the anti-chord that will end everything, using a pick made from the very tip of his scythe.
    • Discworld goes even further with Azrael, the Death of Universes, who is so vast that nebulae are but twinkles in his eye, and his single word takes up a two-page spread on the text.
  • Did Not Get the Girl: Pterry seems fond of this one. In quite a few books, a relationship will be teased between the male and female lead, only for them to go their separate ways at the end. Sometimes it's left up in the air, sometimes they're brother and sister, sometimes they're pulled away by different interests and responsibilities, other times they are going to get to gather but one has to show they're independent thank you very much.
  • Dig Attack: It is hinted that this is how dwarfs carry out war underground. Dwarf war appears to consist in aggressive mining, digging and listening for the other side's tunnels and shafts, and breaking through either to launch direct assaults or else to sneakily undermine and collapse enemy delvings.
  • Disciplines of Magic: Magical knowledge is divided along gender lines, with men going to Unseen University to become wizards and women taking up a sort of apprenticeship to become witches. The two differ in that wizardcraft requires a certain level of analysis and precision while witchcraft utilizes more common sense practices and observational ability. Played with in that Equal Rites seems to indicate there isn't really any rule separating the two other than the more powerful practitioners of each not wanting to share their secrets with the other side.
  • Dismembering the Body:
    • Golems must be destroyed this way as removing their 'chem' (the scroll that powers them) only switches them off. Though you can just destroy that (so long as another is not made).
    • Granny Weatherwax threatens a vampire (vampyre) with this treatment in Carpe Jugulum. Since vampires are immortal, it won't actually kill him, but being staked, burned to dust, scattered to the winds, and left as a cloud of atoms floating through space for billions of years is close enough for the townsfolk.
  • Divine Birds: Parodied with Blind Io, the Top God of the local pantheon. His defining characteristic is that he has no eyes in his head, instead of having a myriad of disembodied floating ones that observe the world for him. Like other sky gods, he uses birds as divine messengers, which is unfortunate because his bird of choice is ravens, which tend to cause trouble with all the floating eyeballs.
  • Divine Conflict: In the early novels, the gods of Cori Celesti are engaged in an aeons-long feud with the Ice Giants, who play their radio too loud and have refused to return the lawnmower.
  • Divine Right of Kings:
    • A lot of people on the Disc believe in this, which Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch hates. He bitterly notes that people are willing to put up with a lot of crap just because someone royal said so. His own ancestor, Suffer-Not-Injustice "Old Stoneface" Vimes, killed the last king of Ankh-Morpork, a horrific Caligula who was known for "entertaining" children in the palace dungeons. Old Stoneface still gets made out as the villain of the tale, somehow. To make things worse for the Vimes family, the (brutally psychopathic) King in question is known historically as "King Lozenzo The Kind".
    • Carrot Ironfoundersson is almost certainly the rightful king of Ankh-Morpork, and is a kind and friendly soul who loves everyone and is loved by everyone. In fact, he's such an excellent king that he refuses to take the throne (or even acknowledge his right), as Vimes and Vetinari are doing a fine job of ruling the city. And despite his affable nature, it's repeatedly made clear that the "divine right" of his ancestors revolved mostly around being really good at killing anyone who disagreed with them.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?:
    • Parallels are drawn between magic and nuclear power/science: borne out the structure of the universe, it's immensely powerful and can be employed for much benefit, but has to be handled with great care. Places where it went wrong are left barren and toxic and may simply be craters, and the waste products are dangerous and damaging for centuries afterwards, but generally it's perfectly safe to be around right up until the moment when it very much isn't. This is due likely in part to how Sir Terry Pratchett was once a press officer for Britain's nuclear energy providers, and best summed up with the below quote from Going Postal:
      "That's why [magic] was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not "not doing magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."
    • The wizards are a contentious group, clashing, talking over each other, getting distracted, going off on tangents and arguing over details, but they always figure out what kind of magical trouble is happening, what it means and what they need to do about it. Pratchett has quite a lot of scientist fans who say that this is very similar to the way scientific research really works, and is true for academia in general.
    • One that sticks to the forefront is everything to do with female dwarfs seems to be just like gay people in the real world. It Makes Sense in Context, as female dwarfs look so much like male dwarfs that a large part of dwarfish courtship involves figuring out if the other person is actually a different sex from yourself. Recent attempts by some female dwarfs to assert their femininity haven't been met kindly by the more conservative factions.
      • A closer allegory may be Transgender people's plight in the real world. Since the dwarfs are (at least on the surface) a One-Gender Race, any dwarf identifying as the "wrong" gender gets about the same reaction as people beginning transitioning do in real life. There's even a case of "self-trans panic" in the books, wherein the villain of The Fifth Elephant turns out to be a closeted "female dwarf" who had a mental breakdown due to a combination of stress and cognitive dissonance—she was a prim and proper dwarf, but prim and proper dwarfs don't have dreams of wearing leather skirts and flowing chainmail dresses—brought on by the growing dwarf femininity movement.
  • Double Entendre: 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"note ) 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").
    • And the seamstresses!
      • Which is doubly effective in Dutch: the Dutch word for "sewing" also means "screwing", and as a result "seamstress" has always been a somewhat uncommon, but very recognisable euphemism for a you-know-what in the Netherlands.
      • This may also be a reference to Medieval and Renaissance literature. At that time, "seamstress" was such a common term for "prostitute" that it hardly counted as a euphemism. Lazarillo de Tormes is one example.
      • Not just in medieval times — up until the 19th century, at least, in some places.
      • Of course amongst the, ahem, seamstresses there is also a woman which can actually sew, for those customers who got it wrong.
  • The Don:
    • "Legitimate Businessman" Chrysophrase the troll. Naturally, Pterry can't help but pun—high level troll gangsters are referred to as "Tons".
    • Harry King fits the type as well, but he's not a criminal (though ironically, he is literally in the recycling business, which could also be called waste management, a stereotype for American Dons' "legitimate" businesses).
  • Don't Fear the Reaper: Although he initially appears as a hostile figure, Death rapidly develops into a sympathetic and well-meaning public servant who takes an interest in humanity and does his best to ease people through their transition to the next world.
    Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?
  • "Down Here!" Shot:
    • The six-inch-tall Wee Mad Arthur introduces himself with "Down here, bigjobs".
    • Dwarfs such as Cheery Littlebottom have also been known to utter the words.
  • Dragon Variety Pack:
    • Swamp dragons, Draco vulgaris, come in numerous varieties, many of which were bred as high society pets and require special care to prevent them from accidentally exploding. The Last Hero in particular gives a highly-detailed, illustrated breakdown of Swamp Dragons and their quirks. The same book also features moon dragons, which are more aerodynamic, less explosive version of the typical swamp dragons and fly by jet propulsion by venting their flames from the other direction. Errol from Guards! Guards! is considered to possibly be an evolutionary throwback to these dragons.
    • The dragon featured in Guards! Guards! is a noble dragon, Draco nobilis, a more typical Western-style dragon to the point that people think they need to offer a suitable sacrifice to appease it.
  • Drop-In Landlord: Due to Ankh-Morpork's "metaphysical housing crisis", several characters live in boarding houses with comical landladies of various types. The most frequently mentioned is Mrs Cake, a spiritualist whose house is open to the vitally challenged and morphologically variable.
  • Dueling Messiahs: Watch Commander Sam Vimes (who believes, in a cynical kind of way, in trying to enforce justice) vs benevolent dictator Lord Vetinari, in Discworld. Both want what's best for Ankh-Morpork, but they often butt heads when Vetinari's using some of his more... unsavory methods, while Vimes's policing just flat out ruins Vetinari's plans.
  • Dying Candle: The arrival of DEATH is always heralded by any candles in the vicinity snuffing out.

    Tropes E to H 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: The earliest books are quite different in tone, the characterization is different, things like troll biology are wildly different, all sorts of things. Sir Pterry spent some time building a plausible demiphysics based on the nature of the Disc (eight seasons, a tropical belt at the edge and polar hub, etc), a mythology founded on that (the number eight, Eldritch Abominations) and so on. Except for the occasional reference to the eight day week and the eight seasons of the year, most of that is dropped/downplayed in favor of focusing on character pieces and archetype development.
  • Eat Dirt, Cheap: Trolls eat rocks, though, as with actual food, there's grades and divisions of quality. It can even get stale.
  • Eccentric Exterminator: Any rat catcher so far, they almost become rats themselves as is the case of Maskerade or you're at the point that you're the same size as the rats like Wee Mad Arthur, this is just scratching the surface mind you, with out getting into all the The Pied Piper of Hamelin refrences.
  • Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The Gorunna Trench, mentioned a number of times in the series, is the deepest part of the Disc's seas and home to horrific things — according to some, horrors from the Dungeons Dimensions still lurk within it. The Colour of Magic notes that even krakens only go through it in pairs, and deep-sea fish keep their lights doused to avoid attracting attention to themselves.
  • Elemental Plane: Death's Domain and the Palace of Time. Both symbolizing their concepts as much as the Anthropomorphic Personifications who inhabit them do.
  • Element No. 5: Surprise.
  • Elite Mooks: The modern Watch is often viewed this way by people opposing them. Criminals and cons trying their usual tricks on "stupid guards" tend to be surprised by the smart tactics Vimes has instilled in his troops.
  • Ethnic God:
    • Some consider Tak the god of the dwarfs; however, while the Dwarfs believe Tak made the world (as well as Dwarfs, men, and trolls), they don't worship him as a rule.
    • Some human nationalities also have their own specific gods: Omnians worship Om, and Borogravians have Nuggan (though most of them actually worship the Duchess, who has posthumously become the equivalent against her will).
  • Evil Chancellor:
    • It's pretty much a default rule of the Disc that any man made Chancellor, or Grand Vizier, or whatever the local equivalent is is a corrupt, scheming bastard, if he wasn't one already. "Apparently a predilection to cackle and plot is part of the job spec". Of course, since everyone else on the Disc is aware of this, opportunities for scheming tend to be limited.
    • Subverted with the Evil Priests, according to Pyramids. While they do suffer the same reputation as Viziers, this is malicious slander on men who are legitimately devout in their faith, and are prepared to sacrifice as many people as it takes to prove it.
  • Evil Is Sterile: The Auditors. As the accountants of reality, they are the fundamental opposite of creativity, and loathe all forms of life, let alone creative thinking. Yet in Thief of Time they manage to create human bodies through mimicry and at least appear human, given a certain amount of Uncanny Valley.
  • Exact Words: It's a running joke that the river Ankh is a river only in an extremely generous use of the word. Certainly, there is water in it, but a person's more likely to suffocate than drown if they fall in it.
  • Exclusive Clique Clubhouse: The Assassins' Guild School believes in the House system and each of its Houses of Study has its own unique character. The offered accommodation - dorms and study rooms - remain stylishly spartan. But, for example, Mrs Beddowes' House appears to be exclusively for the sons of the nobility, and maintains the old exclusivity of the Guild, in the face of a more egalitarian era and an enforced co-education. Black Widow House is what it says in the label - it educates attitudinal Young Ladies with, possibly, a pragmatic attitude towards men who have outlived their usefulness. Meanwhile B2 and C2 houses, so new and disregarded they don't have names, appear to be the depositories for pupils with "assisted places", Scholarships and bursaries - ie, the Deserving Poor.
  • Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: Pratchett's universe exists to showcase this trope. Yes, there are trolls and dwarves and vampires and goblins and wizards. They all live in the big city and are, for the most part, trying to get by in life like everyone else, with regular jobs and all. Every fantasy series has a big city — few of them go into detail about how much trade and bureaucracy is needed to make that city work. Pratchett has said the concept of the Discworld is taking a very realistic look at fantasy, and he envisioned it as a world that keeps functioning even when it's not on the page.
  • Extremophile Lifeforms:
    • Trolls are living rocks whose brains are impure silicon, meaning they're slow and stupid under the snowline and extremely intelligent in the cold. However, they're still susceptible to freezing to death — their cold tolerance is much higher than a human's, but it still has its own limits.
    • Golems are made of clay, so they're resistant to a lot of things like lightning (allowing them to be atheists when Discworld gods are trigger-happy with the Bolt of Divine Retribution), heat (they can walk through fire and hold liquid metal), cold, and extreme pressure (one was buried on the ocean floor for centuries). As we find out in Going Postal, they can't take extreme heat and cold at the same time.
  • Eye-Dentity Giveaway: The nature of one's eyes cannot be changed through magic or shapeshifting. This is often the only clue to the nature of the gods when they go about in disguise; the Lady's eyes, for instance, are always a startling green, while Destiny's are black pits dusted with faint lights.
  • Eyes Are Mental: One of the laws of magic is that transformations can never change a creature's eyes. This rule holds even for gods.
  • The Fair Folk:
    • Elves. If you're thinking Legolas and Elrond, think again. In line with older folklore, they're without empathy, sadistic, abduct beings from their home dimensions and would be the only Discworld race to be Always Chaotic Evil if they didn't play by Blue-and-Orange Morality.
    • The Nac Mac Feegle are not sadistic or otherworldly (some are downright friendly), but they're hardly happy little wood sprites. Picture a kleptomaniac, hard-drinking, bar-brawling Glaswegian in the body of a Smurf.
  • Fairy Tale Free-for-All: The series holds that such stories are archetypes, wanting to be repeated over and over again, so that there are dozens of Cinderellas, Sleeping Beauties, etc. Wyrd Sisters introduces the idea and provides Black Aliss as the Wicked Witch of several stories and Fairy Godmother of others, many years ago. Witches Abroad plays more fully with this trope, with Lilith de Tempscire intentionally playing out stories and playing merry havoc with people's lives.
  • Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Is Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler selling sausages? Then another stupid moneymaking scheme has just blown up in his face.
  • Fantastic Fallout: To the extent that magic is often treated as similar to nuclear energy, overuse of magic in an area will often permanently affect the land, leaving strange, lingering, and reality-warping effects such as flipped coins tending to come down on their edges (that is, of course, if they even come down at all, or haven't changed into something else entirely).
  • Fantastic Naming Convention:
    • In the Agatean Empire, almost every male's name is number-adjective-noun, such as Nine Turning Mirrors and Six Beneficent Winds. Two Little Wang is particularly disgruntled about this...because he considers 'two' unlucky. Some characters lack the adjective and run it into one word (Twoflower, Ninereeds). Word of God invoked from Terry Pratchett is "I think I pinched the Mayan construction."
    • And then there's dwarf Patronymics, which stack. So after a few generations you get Glod Glodssonssonssonsson.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • Dwarfs versus trolls.
    • Humans versus trolls in some places.
    • Just about everyone versus goblins.
    • One book notes that on the Disc, normal racism isn't really prominent. Instead "Black and white get along in perfect harmony and gang up on green". As time goes by this becomes less and less accurate though, and by the time of Jingo there is plenty of old-fashioned intra-human racism going on as well as the more specific fantastical version.
    • Generally averted with Lady Sybil, who goes so far as to do those private conversations with her old friends who make unpleasant remarks about the people she is traveling with. Her internal dialog in one book mentions that she knows few trolls, but the trolls she does know are pretty much like everyone else: trying to raise their children and looking out for the next dollar.
    • Vimes, who regards dwarfs and trolls as just people, has a thing against the undead, although he gets over it gradually as the series goes on and various types of undead prove to be useful members of the Watch.
    • The undead (and werewolves) hate golems. The living races just have a tendency to view them as things, rather than people.
  • Fantastic Terrorists: Mime artistry is absolutely banned by order of the Patrican. A shadowy group of rogue mime artistes frequently express their dissent at this by holding impromptu street performances of their skills under the Free The Mime! banner. Ankh-Morpork citizens live in fear of the terrifying men in black with white pancake makeup appearing from nowhere and striking without warning in support of their Cause, leaving their victims with PTSD that can last for years.
  • Fantastic Underclass:
    • Goblins only gained the full rights of a sapient humanoid race after their systemic abuse became public knowledge; even after emancipation, those who moved to Ankh-Morpork and are actually considered useful in menial jobs are forced to live in a shantytown outside the city limits — shades of South Africa in the Apartheid era.
    • Lower than Goblins are Gnolls, who do the street cleaning of the filthiest and most disgusting street refuse (and are suspected of actually eating a lot of it).
  • Fantastic Vermin: The Unseen University is saturated with sometimes dangerous levels of magic, which has given rise to some rather unusual pests and indoor fauna. These include .303 bookworms, which feed on dangerous magical tomes by burrowing through them at extremely high speeds and present a potentially significant danger for anyone in their path when they shoot out of a bookshelf's far end, ants intelligent enough to pull carts and use beetles as beasts of burden, cockroaches that can march by the billions with their steps perfectly in time, escaped demons in the cellars, rats capable of understanding or even using human speech, and "that very rare indoorovore, the Uncommon Sock Eater".
  • Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: Later novels draw parallels to The War on Terror. The terrorist actions of the fundamentalist "deep dwarfs" (who cover themselves from head to foot because they consider it a sin to look on sunlight) are highly reminiscent of radical Islam.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Appliance: All over the place, with counterparts ranging from PDAs (the pocket imp Vimes uses) to the telegraph (the clacks system). In the beginning this was clearly done more with humour in mind, but over time these ideas have been extrapolated to have more complexity and effect on the setting. The clacks has recently been ungraded to take account of colour, not unlike fibre-optics...
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: As "Discworld is a world and a mirror of worlds", most cultures in the series have some real-life equivalent, often to create an Anachronism Stew fantasy setting along with satirizing the original Earth cultures.
    • Ankh-Morpork started as a parody of the fantasy City of Adventure exclusively populated by thieves, assassins, wizards, roving bands of heroes and tavern staff. With time, it developed into a cross between that, Elizabethan London and modern New York or London. Pratchett himself describes it as a cross between Renaissance Florence, nineteenth-century Seattle, modern-day New York, and Victorian London & Amsterdam. They also generally hold a geopolitical position analogous to the United Kingdom on the Disc as a whole.
    • The Sto Plains (the numerous feuding kingdoms and city-states surrounding Ankh-Morpork) are an overall analogue to Western Europe (in particular Europeans' Cultural Posturing and belief that they were more advanced than the rest of the world when in reality, the Far East and Islamic world were considerably more advanced for the majority of history). Contained therein, Lancre is part of a fantasy-land countryside of witches, farmers, small kingdoms, mountains, elves and such, and largely rural England, particularly the West Country or the Lake District. It's perhaps more specifically Lancashire, especially the northern, more hilly and more rural, half, famous for the Pendle Witches of the early 17th century.
      • The Chalk has the landscape, geology, and general cultural feel of rural southern and eastern England - though the shepherds' counting language comes from Cumbria, and the contrast between the Chalk people's suspicion of witches and the respect they are accorded in the nearby Ramtop Mountains is very reminiscent of the dichotomy between the witch-hunting Lowlands and magic-positive Highlands in early modern Scotland.
      • Also part of the Sto Plains, Llamedos is Wales. Complete with rain and extra consonants.
    • Überwald is equal parts the spooky Central and Eastern European don't-go-near-the-castle Dracula country, and the countries formed in the wake of the breakup of the USSR with just a hint of the German states making up/resulting from the Holy Roman Empire. The USSR itself and Stalin have their counterparts in the (offscreen) Evil Empire and Emperor respectively, which united Uberwald until their fall (while their name of the "Unholy Empire" is a clear spoof of the Holy Roman Empire). In The Compleat Discworld Atlas, the plethora of small countries and states in the Far Überwald area are explicitly likened to the states that emerged after the fall of the USSR as a sort of "Russian Confederation", and are seeking to form a common economic and trading area. A more specific example can be seen in Monstrous Regiment, with the Uberwaldian states of Borogravia and Zlobenia both being designed as clear parallels to the many warring and feuding Balkan states left after the disintegration of Yugoslavia intermixed with Afghanistan under the Taliban (though the "Girls' Working School" in Borogravia is inspired more by Ireland's infamous Magdalene Laundries).
    • The Agatean Empire, the dominant government of the Counterweight Continent (no doubt that's just the Morporkian name for it) is the Far East (mostly Japan during the late Edo period and dynasty-era China), although Thailand and its food gets a honorable mention, and a Discworld Expy of Korea sneaks into the last couple of books. The island of Bhangbhangduc is also meant as an analogue to the Roundworld isle of Borneo.
    • The nation of Klatch is Arabia, but has a relationship with Ankh-Morpork as "the old enemy" mostly mellowed into tolerance akin to Britain and France. They also borrow certain elements from India (Klatchian takeaways in Ankh-Morpork sell currynote  and the Klatchian Jungle is home to tigers), and are generally used as a shorthand to represent anything seen as generically "foreign" from the perspective of the West.
      • Klatch the continent is large enough that different parts of it function as expies for different countries, including (but not limited to) Turkey, Ancient Egypt, the biblical Middle East, Arabia, Persia, and Pakistannote .
    • XXXX (or Fourecks) is a big canvas of Australian cliches. Its neighboring "Foggy Islands" evoke the Maori name for New Zealand, "the land of the long fog".
    • Quirm, on the whole, is France. Good food, but often too heavy on the "avec". On the other hand, its most famous resident, Leonard of Quirm, is a clear Expy of Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most famous Italians in history.
    • Howandaland (a large region of the continent of Klatch) is sketched out as Darkest Africa with a tantalizing hint of white colonial Africa, but hasn't been seen much in the booksnote .
    • Found in the aforementioned continent of Klatch bordering the Circle Sea (the Disc's analogue to the Mediterranean Sea), Ephebe is Ancient Greece (being primarily influenced by classical Athens) and Tsort is Troy along with the greater Persian Empire. Between them is the Ancient Egypt-inspired Djelibeybi. Omnia, meanwhile, initially resembles an bizarre mix between the medieval Vatican (the shape of the world controversy is clearly based on the Catholic Church vs. Galileo), Khomeini's Iran, and Inquisition-era Spain, and later evolves over the course of Small Gods into becoming more of an analogue to just the medieval Vatican mixed in with Israel.
    • Genua is New Orleans, Louisiana in its first appearance, but in later books it becomes a counterpart of Italy. In still later books Brindisi became an Expy of both Italy and Spain.
    • The Nac Mac Feegle, as expanded upon in the Tiffany Aching books, are basically a cartoonish version of the Celts with permanent woad.
    • invoked The dwarfs have elements of Jewish culture (Jewish Mother in particular), Scandinavians (see especially their names), and — obviously — the dwarves from The Lord of the Rings, a line from which was the direct inspiration for their complete lack of sexual dimorphism throughout most of the books. There is also a (small) faction of dwarfish supremacists (e.g., Thud!'s Hamcrusher) who can be seen as having applicability to a large number of real-world conflicts.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Map: The great sprawling port city of Ankh-Morpork evolves over the series. Ankh-Morpork and its surrounding areas are, very deliberately, written to depict a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of England in its various forms. If this wider area depicts England, then its biggest city becomes, by degrees, a version of London. The City Map makes this explicit: the River Ankh is a loop-for-loop copy of the River Thames as it flows through London. The isthmus of the Isle of Gods is in the same relative place, the same shape, and carries much the same landmarks, as the "Isle of Dogs" in London, for instance. The city's district names also have echoes of those in London: examples include "Dimwell" for Milwall, "Dolly Sisters" for Seven Sisters.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Myth:
    • In Eric, Rincewind and Eric travel back in time to the Tsortean War, an obvious parody of The Trojan War.
    • The Last Hero opens with a retelling of the Disc's version of the Prometheus myth, with the hero Fingers Mazda stealing fire from the gods.
    • In Carpe Jugulum, Bishop Horn is mentioned as the Omnian equivalent of Noah, although the Quite Reverend Mightily Oats has noticed that a lot of cultures on the Disc, as on our world, have some kind of flood myth.
    • In Men at Arms, legend has it that the sword of the Kings of Ankh-Morpork was pulled out of a stone by the first king, thus proving his worthiness. Although the Disc tends towards All Myths Are True, this one is a misinterpretation: it turns out the true king can drive his incredibly sharp but extremely unmagical sword into a stone.
    • Most Discworld gods, especially in the main pantheon, are based on real world archetypes. Blind Io is Zeus with a few elements of Odin, Bilious the God of Wine is Dionysius (in Hogfather, he even has maenads), the Tezumen god Quetzovercoatl in Eric is Quetzalcoatl, the various Djelibeybian gods in Pyramids are the Egyptian pantheon, and so on.
    • The Hogfather himself is the Discworld counterpart of Santa Claus, but with more of a focus on pork products.
  • Fantasy Gun Control: Crossbows generally take the place of firearms on Discworld. Though only recently invented, firearms are by no means non-existent. The Assassins' Guild severely restricts the proliferation of firearms and crossbows that have been modified to the point that they can be about as deadly as firearms, as they feel that it would make killing too easy.
  • Fantasy Landmark Equivalent:
    • Havelock Vetenari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, takes people in the Oblong Office, an allusion to the U.S. President's Oval Office.
    • The Kingdom of Djelibeybi in Pyramids is in the midst of constructing the titular structures as an allusion to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
    • Pyramids also has the Lighthouse of Ephebe, an allusion to the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria. (The Ephebian version was built in the wrong place because it was felt that was more aesthetically satisfying, and most sailors agree it is indeed a very nice thing to look at while they're run aground.)
    • In The Last Continent, the city of Bugarup has an opera house that "looks like an open box of tissues", or "is about to set sail"; given that the work is a commentary on the country of Australia, this is clearly meant to be a pastiche of the Sydney Opera House.
    • The Collapsed Tower of Quirm is what happens when the equivalent to Leaning Tower of Pisa is built by Bloody Stupid Johnson.
    • Mentioned in Men at Arms are Ankh-Morpork's Triumphant Arch (Paris's Arc de Triomphe) and the Colossus of Morpork (the Colossus of Rhodes), although whether they count as "landmarks" is debatable, since Bloody Stupid Johnson made them pocket-sized by mistake.
    • Small Gods has the Library of Ephebe, a collection of all the works by the great Ephebian philosophers, as a verison of the Library of Alexandria.
  • Fantasy Pantheon: The gods play games with the lives of men and toss bricks and lightning bolts at atheists.
  • Fertility God: Gods tend to merge with each other across different cultures due to the way belief works on the Disc, so it's explained there's only one fertility goddess with a very large collection of wigs and padded bras.
  • Fictional Colour: Octarine, the colour of magic (it's sort of a greenish purple).
  • Fictional Constellations: The Discworld's constellations are primarily used for the Fictional Zodiac and change as the Turtle moves past them.
  • Fictional Painting: Leonard of Quirm's "Woman Holding Ferret" is the Disc's equivalent of the "Lady with an Ermine", and "Mona Ogg", which is obviously the Disc's equivalent of Mona Lisa (which portrays a young Nanny Ogg)
  • Fictional Zodiac: The Disc has its own version of the zodiac. It involves such signs as The Small Boring Group of Faint Stars and Khefin's Eye 1-4.
  • Firefighter Arsonist: Ankh-Morpork's long-disbanded Guild of Fire Fighters is implied to have been arsonists. They were paid either by the fire put out, or via insurance policies advertised with lines like "that thatch roof there, would go up like a torch with one carelessly thrown match, know what I mean."
  • Fire Keeps It Dead: Zombies are very strong, immortal and able to sew themselves back together if need be. However, the older they get, the drier they get, and so they're understandably nervous around fire.
  • Fire Stolen from the Gods:
    • The Discworld version of Prometheus was also the first thief (and its first hero), named "Fingers" Mazda, whose first mention in Men at Arms is a double pun (the narration says he got burned on that deal as it was too hot to fence). The gods made him immortal and also chained him to a rock to have his liver eaten every day.
    • The Last Hero concerns the efforts of Cohen the Barbarian's Silver Horde to "return" fire to the gods, in the form of a keg of explosive powerful enough to destroy Cori Celesti (and thus the Disc) as a form of Rage Against the Heavens for the gods letting one of their friends die of choking on a cucumber. Eventually they are stopped, but steal the horses from the Valkyries who came for them and head off into the stars, only stopping by Mazda's rock to break his chains and leave him a sword. Mazda doesn't quite get what's happening, but for the first time he can't wait for the eagle to get there.
  • Flanderization:
    • Uberwaldian Dwarves were originally referenced as only vaguely religious. By the time of Raising Steam they're The Fundamentalist terrorists who look to Tak, previously remarked upon as playing an ancillary role in the creation of Dwarves, as the almighty font from which all good things flow.
    • Vetinari takes an interest in doing the crossword puzzle, regarding the person that composes them as a Worthy Opponent. Contrast his temperament in Raising Steam, where he crows like a madman after "defeating" her and forcing her to retire.
    • The kingdom of Lancre in Wyrd Sisters is described as tiny in regards to geography and population, but still with a reasonably sized government. For example the book gives the impression that castle guards number in the dozens. By Lords and Ladies the kingdom is exaggerated into a Oddly Small Organization with only one person working as a castle guard (Shawn Ogg), who also works at the castle as a butler and a cleaner among other roles, and is the only member of Lancre's standing army.
  • Flat World: People, fish, and sea monsters continually fall over the rim. As indeed does the sea, but the Discworld Companion says "arrangements are made" to prevent it all draining away.
  • Flip Personality: Altogether Andrews, first introduced in The Truth.
  • Fluffy Tamer:
    • Lady Sybil Ramkin and her dragons.
    • Nanny Ogg and Greebo.
    • Granny Weatherwax and You the cat.
  • Food God: The Discworld has many:
    • The Hogfather, in addition to being a Santa Claus Expy, has elements of a Food God specializing in pork products.
    • Epidity, God of Potatoes, lord of a Potato Cult.
    • There is a God of Custard, Nog-Humpty
    • While the details are obscure, the Grace Bissonomy has divine associations with both oysters, or perhaps bivalve aqcuatic molluscs in general, and is depicted in iconography as brandishing a bunch of root vegetables that might be parsnips. Or perhaps carrots.
  • Footnote Fever: They show up in most of the books to provide often-humorous clarification or deeper history on some topics.
  • Foreign Queasine: Dwarfs eat rats, which the occasional human will sample. Probably just once.
  • Freudian Trio: The Lancre witches (Magrat: ego, Granny Weatherwax: superego, Nanny Ogg: id. Very, very id.)
  • Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire: All the members of the League of Temperance, who only drink animal blood taken from slaughterhouses. Or switch to something completely different — coffee, anyone?
  • Gargle Blaster: Scumble, which is made from apples (well, mostly apples). A few drops are enough to fell a troll. Nanny Ogg's particular recipe is known as "suicider."
    • Unsurprisingly, variants on the Gargle Blaster are made wherever you might want to find them, and for quite a few different species — as most sapient beings often have a tendency to limit that sapience on a regular basis. Even putting aside the harder drugs found in later books, in Monstrous Regiment, the troll Carborundum wordlessly asks for an 'Electrick Floorbanger' (a takeoff on the classic Harvey Wallbanger found in the Roundworld), which is very simple: eye-searing vinegar, with copper and zinc in it. Carborundum knocks it back, sways for a few moments, and then shows exactly why it's called that.
  • Gem Tissue: The Diamond King of the Trolls isn't just a flowery regal title. He really is made of diamond. Trolls are made of what is called metamorphorical rock, where the silicon-based substance of their bodies is predominantly one form of inorganic silicon tissue: the stuff of their being is partly down to genetic factors, but can also be mimetic of the dominant rock of their surroundings. Many male trolls are simply "Granite" or "Marble" or similar: but female trolls tend to incorporate a lot more wholly and semi-precious gemstones, ie Ruby, Beryl, et c. And, of course, all trolls have diamond teeth — the only material strong enough to grind and break down rock.
  • General Failure: Most military commanders on the Disc are of this bent. The ones on the Sto Plains seem to have it as actual military doctrine that what matters is taking part. Actually winning is seen as either irrelevant or somehow cheating, to say nothing of keeping as many of your troops alive as possible in the mean time.
  • Generational Trauma: The battle of Koom Valley is a recurring Noodle Incident throughout the series to explain why dwarfs hate trolls and vice versa. It's occasionally described as being so chaotic that both sides ambushed themselves. Every fight between the two species since then uses "Remember Koom Valley" as a rallying cry. It's finally resolved in Thud!, when it turns out it was meant to be a peace conference, but the fog that fell made everyone twitchy, and no one knows who attacked first until there was a cave-in that trapped the fighters underground. There, both sides managed to Fling a Light into the Future to explain what had really happened. The cultural implications are so staggering that a dwarf grag attempts to destroy the recording despite the destruction of recorded knowledge being anathema to dwarfs.
  • Genericist Government: Towns have mayors, maybe a council, but that's generally it.
  • Genius Slob: Though they are some of the smartest people on the Disc, the wizards of the Unseen University are essentially a bunch of celibate male students suffering from severe arrested development.
  • Genre Roulette: While the whole series is predominantly Fantasy, the separate arcs within it often adhere to a secondary genre; notably, the City Watch books are also Murder Mysteries/Detective Dramas.
  • Genre Shift: As the series progressed, modern ideas and technologies have slowly entrenched themselves in the Disc, lifting the later books into having a strong flavour of Urban Fantasy.
  • The Ghost:
    • Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, Discworld's most infamous inventor. His works are present throughout the series, but Johnson himself has never made an appearance. Probably because Sybil's grandfather shot the man when it looked like he was about to do work for the Ramkins.
    • Messr Honeyplace, Mr Slant's vampiric partner at Morecombe, Slant and Honeyplace, has never made an appearance. Morecombe is also a vampire and the Ramkin's family solicitor (for multiple generations), but Honeyplace has not been sighted.
    • Mrs Colon, who wins extra points for being The Ghost not only to the reader but also to the other characters, up to and including her own husband, since she always works the exact opposite shift to him. Almost their entire marriage has been conducted through affectionate notes left on the kitchen table. Vimes speculates that their children were the results of particularly persuasive handwriting.
    • Among supernatural entities, the Soul Cake Duck (the Disc's equivalent of the Easter Bunny) has been mentioned many, many times, yet never appeared even in novels where gods, holidays, or childhood beliefs feature prominently.
  • Girls with Moustaches: All dwarfs, openly female or not, have long, flowing beards.
  • Giver of Lame Names: Leonard da Quirm.
    Leonard: Well, because it's submerged in a marine environment, I call it the Going-Under-The-Water-Safely-Device.
  • Gonky Femme: Dwarfs of all genders in Discworld look like small bearded men, so Cheery has to employ Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to show her femininity.
  • Good-Guy Bar: The Bucket. Do not try to take the female watch officer hostage.
  • Good Is Not Dumb: Corporal Carrot IS this trope, though Obfuscating Stupidity has its uses.
  • The Good King: Shows up rather often: King Verence of Lancre, Rhys Rhysson the Low King of the Dwarfs, and Mr Shine the Diamond King of the Trolls all care for their people and want what's best for them. Carrot may qualify (see I Just Want to Be Normal below), but prefers his position in the City Watch while Vetinari governs Ankh-Morpork. In Carrot's defense, Vetinari does an excellent job of running the city, while Carrot believes he can serve it best as a copper.
  • The Grim Reaper: Death puts in at least one appearance in every single Discworld novel except The Wee Free Men and Snuff.
  • Grimy Water: The river Ankh, which is only called a river due to the extremely literal mindset that Ankh-Morpork is famous for. It's far easier to suffocate than drown in it, thanks to the high mud-to-water ratio. The Unseen University hosts its own version of the Oxbridge rowing, but with the twist that there's no actual rowing. Contestants run on the river, in specially prepared boots, lest they lose their feet (and even then, the boots will melt pretty fast).
  • Guile Hero: Moist, Vetinari (although his position on the hero-villain continuum is complicated), Nanny Ogg, and Granny Weatherwax, all in different ways. Carrot and (somewhat less so) Vimes also get moments of this.
  • Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: The "learning to commit more serious crimes" variety is parodied when the Ankh-Morpork Thieves' Guild, an entirely legal organisation, runs official classes in the city's main prison, the Tanty.
  • Hanging Up on the Grim Reaper:
    • Attempted by many a character, with only temporary success at best. One was a distracted dwarf bread museum curator who said he didn't have time to die, as there was an entire collection of battle-breads left to catalog (he fades away shortly after), while Ipslore the Red puts his soul into his staff and passes the staff onto his son, a sourcerer who eventually has enough of his father's abuse and breaks the staff, and Granny Weatherwax once played cards against Death for the lives of a baby and a cow. Death himself is rather bemused by all these attempts, since he sort of remembers everything happening at once, he knows they all die anyway, since he himself lasts to the end of the universe and beyond. It also turns out he couldn't do it if he wanted, such as when his adopted daughter and son-in-law die in a carriage crash: he cannot create life, only grant an extension by taking them to his realm where they don't age (his daughter was sixteen for more than thirty years).
    • When substituting for the Hogfather, he does manage to bend the rules a bit: when he's called to do his duty as death and take away the soul of The Little Match Girl, he takes offense at someone dying so everyone else can feel luckier by comparison, so he gives her the gift of a future. And Albert throws snowballs at the angels who came to take her away.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: Humans are known to have interbred with Dwarves, Elves, and Gods (and the Anrthropomorphic Personification of time, which may or may not count as the latter). Given what the latter two are usually like, it's probably for the best that it doesn't come up much in the books themselves.
  • Happily Married:
    • Commander Vimes and Lady Sybil.
    • Fred Colon and his unnamed wife.
    • King Verence and Queen Magrat of Lancre.
    • Mort and Ysabell, despite their death in a carriage accident.
    • Detritus is said to be Happily Married to Ruby in Thud!, though they lack Babies Ever After.
    • Averted by Carrot and Angua, who eventually do end up living together but seem to have no interest in or intention of getting married, despite being one of the series' Official Couples.
    • Moist and Adora are finally married by the time of Raising Steam.
    • Effie and Harry King.
  • Hat of Authority: Witches and wizards depend on their hats as signifiers of their occult and social status. The Archchancellor's hat carries special (and magical) weight, its wearer being the Archchancellor. Moist von Lipwig also accrues various fancy hats as he is put in charge of different organisations.
  • Hat of Power: The Archchancellor's hat has the memories of all prior Archchancellors and can bestow them as it chooses on anyone who wears the hat, as well as possessing significant magical abilities of its own. At one point it freezes a thief solid for stealing it.
  • Hate Sink: Though many characters are humorous and sympathetic, even the villains, there are plenty of deeply unpleasant, detestable characters:
    • Ipslore the Red, from Sourcery, is a horrifyingly abusive father who tortures his own son into a living weapon and does not take no for an answer, eventually almost causing the end of the world twice. Even his Freudian Excuse and initially legitimate grievance do little to mitigate this, as he becomes far worse than his perceived oppressors, targets people completely unrelated to his initial vengeance and will respond to any act of perceived defiance with maximum aggression.
    • Captain "Mayonnaise" Quirke, the leader of the Ankh-Morpork Day Watch until the end of Men at Arms, is a racist (both against fictional species and against actual human ethnicities) and hideously incompetent at keeping the peace, to the point he causes several race riots when he arrests a troll that was completely incapable of committing the murder it's accused of. He also indulges in literally kicking the dog Gaspode for no reason except spite towards the Night Watch having one on their base. Night Watch also shows him as deeply corrupt in the past and later joining a hit squad to kill John Keel (actually Vimes in disguise) when disciplined by him for his crimes, having the gall to be outraged for this. All of this makes it deeply cathartic when Carrot deposes him and punches him out, leaving him never to be seen again.
    • The closest to a human Big Bad in Soul Music, Mr Clete is the secretary of the musicians guild who keeps trying to have the Band with Rocks In killed purely because they won't pay the extortionate guild fee, to the point that he hires the Assassins against them and then pursues them even when it's not in his best interest. He also attempts to kill his own underling, Satchelmouth, when he refuses to kill the band. The book explicitly notes that he might not be "evil" at the start, but its comparison of him to a rat is still a sign he's loathsome and unpleasant.
    • Dragon-King of Arms, in Feet of Clay, is insufferable towards Vimes in pointing out his family's bad reputation, as well as racist against Angua for being a werewolf. He's also exploiting the golems and engineering the conspiracy to incapacitate Vetinari, which kills an innocent family. He feels no remorse for the deaths he causes from these activities, even indirectly.
    • One half of the Big Bad Duumvirate for The Fifth Elephant, Wolfgang von Uberwald, is a Faux Affably Evil sadist and "pureblood" werewolf, who killed his own younger sister for being stuck in human form permanently, forced his younger brother to flee for fear for further familicide, and helped engineer the conspiracy to kickstart a war between dwarf and troll. Unlike his more sympathetic — if tragically misguided — co-conspirator, his reasons for this are purely for his own amusement. In the Post-Climax Confrontation, he ends up fatally injuring some innocent bystanders and a horse purely because they got in his way.
    • The true Big Bad of Thud!, Grag Ardent, ends up responsible for the death of multiple innocent dwarves and covers up further deaths in the same area, later attempting to start war against trolls out of misguided religious spite and manipulating various historical tomes in spite of his apparent hatred of "destroying words. Returning in Raising Steam, he expands his targets to "anyone not a true dwarf", including goblins and humans, resulting in even more pointless deaths out of his own pettiness. While he does have a redeeming trait in sparing Albrecht Albrechtsson, this still does little to make him likeable in any way.
    • The Cunning Man, antagonist for I Shall Wear Midnight, targets witches that catch his attention while believing them all in need of purging. He does this by causing a Hate Plague, poisoning minds against witches and engineering scenarios where people die so he can blame the witch in question. The climax of the book even has him murder a canary for no practical reason.
    • Snuff manages to get two of these in the same book, made more impressive by one of them never appearing on page:
      • The first, Gravid Rust, was mentioned in Feet of Clay as having shot a servant with a crossbow for tying up his shoelaces wrongly, but then moves on to heading a large trafficking ring where the trafficked goblins are enslaved and worked to death in horrifying conditions. On top of that, he's so insufferable and smug that fellow Hate Sink, Stratford wants to turn King's Evidence not for his own life, but to spite his employer. He ultimately proves so loathsome that Vetinari, usually pragmatic enough to restrain himself, has him quietly assassinated even after his exile.
      • The aforementioned Stratford is a violent, petty thug and Dragon-in-Chief for the aforementioned boss and the magistrates, responsible for the goblin trafficking and enslavement which even sees their children worked to death. He'll also willingly target children even when it doesn't benefit his work.
  • Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?: Played with; most of the time, it's the 6-foot tall Carrot who's doing the mentioning.
  • The Hecate Sisters: The typical arrangement of a group of Witches (which is not a hard and fast rule — some operate alone, and Nanny Ogg states they can operate in up to groups of four or five. Any more is a problem) is the Maiden, the Mother and... the Other One.
  • Heel–Face Town: While Ankh-Morpork May still have a less than stellar reputation, Night Watch reveals that it used to be much, much worse before Lord Vetinari became patrician. Later on, it's actually starting to become a decent city due in part to the progress of technology such as trains and c-mail.
  • Hegemonic Empire: Ankh-Morpork used to be the more traditional type of Empire, but this way was more sustainable. The city-state only directly controls a small portion of land, but its economic influence throughout the continent is almost limitless, and its production is so great no one dares invade for fear of being deprived of the very tools needed for invasion. It's also the center of all information trade, giving it unequaled political clout in the region.
  • Height Insult: Attempting to insult a dwarf by calling them a variant of "lawn ornament" or saying "Sorry, I could not see you down there" is basically a suicidal move.
  • Hell-Bent for Leather: In Soul Music, the Dean gets a leather jacket with "Born to Rune" on the back. It doesn't come out often after that, but when it does, it should be an instant Oh, Crap! for whatever the Wizards of UU are going to war against.
  • The Help Helping Themselves: The matter of servants and housekeepers stealing petty objects from their masters is discussed in several books, and even serves as a plot point in Feet of Clay.
  • He Who Must Not Be Named:
    • Inverted with Lady Luck, the only goddess who must depart if her name is spoken.
    • Played straight with elves, as saying or even thinking their name too much tends to attract them, especially if the walls of reality are wearing thin.
  • 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.
    • There's also the Scalby, which is to Rats what Rats are to... things that make them look like better things than Scalbies. Scalbies are described as "Carrion birds that would eat stuff that would make vultures sick. Scalbies would eat Vulture sick."
  • Honor Before Reason: The Assassin's Guild ("Where style counts!") operate by a code of conduct which they follow very strictly, which allows people like Sam Vimes, or less pleasant sorts like Lord Snapcase, to outwit them. These include things like never just shanking a "client" in the streets, because that is the way of the common thug, and always wearing black, even when it's a disadvantage, because of aforementioned style.
  • Humans are Leaders: Not too surprising, as humans appear to be the most populous species. But in Ankh-Morpork, dwarfs, trolls, and vampires are factions that Vetinari and the Watch deal with like any other guild.
  • Human Jungle Gym: One of the illustrations in the spin-off work Mrs Bradshaw's Guidebook to the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygenic Railway shows a beach scene in which two human children are climbing over their troll nanny.

    Tropes I to L 
  • Idealist vs. Pragmatist: The dynamic between Sam Vimes and Carrot Ironfoundersson can be considered this. Both of them have moral codes that they stick to — it's just that Vimes's is shaped by thirty years of seeing that Humans Are Bastards. They serve as Foils to each other, with Vimes tempering Carrot's youthful idealism, while Carrot reminds him what it means to be a good copper.
  • The Igor: An entire family of them that does henching and Mad Science professionally. They also pioneer surgical techniques and do it almost recreationally; when an Igor is said to have his father's eyes, it's probably not a figure of speech. They may have been handed down through the generations (a good pair of hands are worth hanging onto as well). One of them has a pet dog made up of the pieces of many other pet dogs; though he's very upset when Scraps gets killed off, he consoles himself that it's only a matter of time until the next thunderstorm. Male Igors are Kavorka Men and considered quite the prize for young women, whereas the Igorinas are cute monster girls mixed with Head-Turning Beauty — 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. When we finally get an on-screen Igorina (in Monstrous Regiment) she makes an off-hand remark that the scars from the stitching can be gotten rid of in 15 minutes with the right ointment. That means that Igors go around covered in scars because that's how Igors want to look. Other books clarify that the igor stitches are actually clan markings.
  • I Just Want to Be Normal:
    • Susan Sto Helit desperately wants to lead an ordinary life, which is complicated by the fact that her parents are Death's adopted daughter and his former apprentice. And she's a duchess.
    • Rincewind hates being forced into dangerous quests to save the world, and would like nothing more than to be bored the rest of his life.
    • Carrot Ironfoundersson may also qualify, as despite the fact that he probably is the heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork, he prefers to be a copper.
  • Imagination Destroyer: The Auditors of Reality despise the concept of imagination, considering it to be a reason for humanity's "messiness", and try to compromise it by eliminating the Hogfather.
  • Immortality Field:
    • Death's domain is located outside of time, so things either don't age or do so only if he allows it. His adopted daughter Ysabella comes off as a Bratty Teenage Daughter at first before you learn she's been sixteen years old for more than thirty years.
    • Alberto Malich once performed the Death-summoning Rite of Ashk-Ente in reverse, believing it would keep Death away from him. Instead, it summoned him to Death's domain, where he has lived as Death's manservant ever since without aging a day. But if he goes back to the world, he starts aging again (except on Hogswatchnight).
  • Imperfect Ritual: Subverted, as usual. Wizard magic is often done with an elaborate ritual, but most of that is just for looks. Several books feature the Rite of Ashk'Ente, which only needs one wizard, three bits of wood, and a fresh egg. If you haven't got a fresh egg, a few drops of mouse blood will do. But wizards generally feel that if you don't have eight archmages chanting at the corners of an octagram filled with occult paraphenalia, you aren't doing it properly. Witches are more practical; they're not above doing something impressive for headological purposes but when nobody's watching will take whatever shortcuts are available.
  • Incredibly Lame Fun: Trolls gamble by tossing something up and then betting on whether or not it will come down. (This is the Discworld. It might not.)
  • Insistent Terminology:
    • There is a certain word which the Librarian is often referred to but which he is most emphatically not, and will take great pains to correct if ever he hears it. Because he isn't. note 
    • The three phases of witchery are the maiden, the mother, and .... the other one. Not, just choosing a word at random here, "crone". Definitely not. It's ... the other one.
    • The Assassins Guild does not "kill" or "murder" their targets. Common thugs murder, and the assassins are not thugs. So they "inhume" their "clients". Assassins are also never "hired". Being hired makes you a servant, and Assassins are gentlemen and no-ones servant. Assassins can however be "contracted", "engaged" or "enticed to remove a certain razorblade from the great candy floss of life in exchange for a small gratuity".
  • Interspecies Romance: Throughout the City Watch cycle we have Carrot (male human) and Angua (female werewolf).
  • Intra-Scholastic Rivalry: Assassins Guild divides its students into multiple houses, each named after a venomous animal. The houses compete against each other in various sports and also in activities such as "lofting", where each house builds a structure somewhere on the Guild roof, and a prize goes to the best one. It is considered totally acceptable for the houses to sabotage each others' loftings, with some senior Assassins believing the low-grade war that results is worth a year of theory.
  • Invented Invalid: In later city watch books, the City Watch gives an allowance of days off for three grandmother's funerals per year.
  • 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. And some of the less powerful ones, too. Nuggan, for example, who seems to be the divine equivalent of someone who's gone pants-on-head neurotic.
  • Job Mindset Inertia:
    • In Night Watch, Vimes gets sent back in time to when the Watch was still a joke, and while he quickly ends up running it he forgets that he no longer has access to troll or dwarf officers. The fact that he's clearly used to being in charge despite looking like a nobody gets him noticed by the conspirators.
    • Unseen Academicals: Glenda is so used to being the Cloudcuckoolander's Minder for Juliet it takes her a while to notice that her (s)mothering is of no use to a natural fashion model.
    • Sourcery: When confronted with his former professors, Rincewind briefly falls back into the role of a punished student, to everyone's embarrassment.
  • Just Following Orders: Subverted, inverted, played with, deconstructed, and generally given hell from (at the very latest) Guards! Guards! onwards, it seems to be Sam Vines raison d'etre to combat this trope such as when he orders Detritus to shot an offending individual knowing what the troll will donote . Its brother trope Just Giving Orders shows up as well.
  • The Journey Through Death: The desert, a vast, flat stretch of sand across which the dead must pass in order to find whatever awaits them at the other end.
  • Keeping the Handicap: The Librarian was turned into an orangutan many years ago. While it has significantly reduced his intelligence (Word of God is that he can no longer even think in human languages), he has steadfastly refused and/or sabotaged any attempts to change him back, because he's found his new orangutan body beneficial to his job (for one thing, climbing bookshelves is much easier with feet that can grasp like hands.)
  • The Kingslayer: "Old Stoneface" Vimes, ancestor of the current Vimes, chopped the King's head after he was sentenced to death by a tribunal for his horrific crimes. He was the only one with the balls to do it. He was later executed, his body getting the Osiris treatment. His bad reputation was so powerful, his descendants many generations later are still being bugged about it.
  • Klingon Promotion: Standard practice at Unseen University until Ridcully arrives. His sheer unkillability rather spoils the attitude, and eventually the Wizards decide they actually rather like not having to constantly watch for their own impending death.
  • Lacerating Love Language: Courtship between Trolls takes this form. Trolls are a very physical race made out of animate stone; a Troll girl wants to know if her desired male is capable of hitting her so hard with a thrown rock note  that she is stunned, if not knocked out. In return, she punches him as hard as she can. Then romance continues in an appropriately physical manner.
  • Lack of Empathy: the reoccurring, biggest red flag with true villains in the series: while a person may be ill-tempted, scruffy, or a bit nasty, the real source of evil, as Granny Weatherwax puts it, "starts with treating people like things."
  • Lady Luck: "The Lady" is possibly the single most powerful goddess on the Disc, since despite having no dedicated worshipers or temples, everyone hopes that she exists and smiles upon them at some point in their lives, and many people pay her lip-service through the repetitive prayer "please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please...". She is the eternal rival of the god Fate, being one of the only entities capable of upsetting his plans. She is known to give her aid to certain mortals who entertain her, with Rincewind being one of her favourites, but must instantly leave the presence of anyone who calls her by her true name.
  • Lady Legionnaire Wear: The ladies of the Watch wear armor with this — in Men At Arms it's said that Angua, the first female to join the Watch, will need the blacksmith to hammer out her breastplate (which was the same issue as the male watchmen's) by quite a bit before she can wear it.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Just about every book not only includes a lot of Trope Play, but a lot of Genre Savvy characters who will know just what's going on, and will be in no way shy about stating it.
  • Left Field Description:
    • There are a couple of instances of items "flying through the air, like a partridge".
    • Hogfather: "Long ago, someone had made [the carpet] by carefully knotting long bits of brightly colored rag into a sacking base, giving it the look of a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog."
  • Legendary Weapon: The Sword of the Kings of Ankh. According to the Discworld Companion, in the later years of the Ankh-Morpork monarchy, many fake swords started popping up in the hands of various claimants, to the point that King Blad claimed the throne on the basis of two bits of wood nailed together. It is generally agreed that the true sword must have been shiny, probably magical and always catch the light, and therefore can't possibly be Captain Carrot's, which is none of these things but just really good at being a sword.
    • How good? It's an Absurdly Sharp Blade that routinely cuts straight through other swords and at one point, was driven straight through a man and the stone pillar behind him without much fanfare. The implied reason for its sharpness is that it is completely, boring lt non-magical; since this is the Discworld, this makes it fundamentally more real than just about anything it tries to cut. Needless to say, despite looking like an ordinary, slightly rusted sword, it's generally considered to be the real thing.
  • Limited-Use Magical Device: The Octavo in the first Discworld novels is a tome that was used to create the world; it has eight spells left in it (one of which escaped and inhabited an unwilling wizard), which have to be spoken at the correct time in order for the Discworld to spawn a litter of baby Discworlds. After this is done, the spells disappear.
  • Literal Bookworm: There's the creature known as the 0.303" Bookworm. This evolved in magical libraries and is capable of eating through a whole shelf of semi-sentient magical texts so quickly that they don't have a chance to respond. The ping and richochet of the 0.303" Bookworm is yet another thing that makes magical libraries a hazardous place to work.
  • Literal-Minded: Most, if not all, books will have one or more of these characters, useful for hanging lampshades on metaphors and similes.
    • Early books actually justify it. Dwarfs as a species evolved underground, and thusly metaphor and simile never caught on in their language, due to the dangers of not being able to communicate important facts (for example, the impending collapse of the ceiling) quickly, promptly and accurately. Humans, meanwhile, had most of their capacity for imagination and metaphor bred out of them as a survival response to the Mage Wars, when reality was even looser in the Discworld than it already is, and so stray thoughts and idioms could become real if careless.
    • One of the historical Patricians of Ankh-Morpork, Olaf Quimby II, manifested a particularly intense version of this as part of the inevitable madness that afflicted all past Patricians; he made metaphor and hyperbole illegal and punishable by death. Eventually, he was stabbed to death with a pen by a disgruntled poet whilst personally testing the saying "the pen is mightier than the sword".
  • Limited Advancement Opportunities: The number of wizards who can hold any given level of wizardry has been fixed by tradition for centuries, so no matter how talented a given wizard is, he'll only get promoted if someone higher ranked than him dies or gets promoted into a higher level himself. This lead to the "Dead Man's Pointy Shoes" tradition in which wizards used Klingon Promotion to create openings in the higher levels, which lasted until Mustrum stopped it by virtue of being unkillable.
  • Living Crashpad: The Bursar's been a target for this once or twice.
  • Living Currency: In the villages of Lancre, where hard currency is a rarity, commerce is more likely to be negotiated in chickens than in coins.
  • Living Legend: Has its own page.
  • Living Structure Monster: Unseen University is explicitly described as a building complex that throughout its two-thousand year history has absorbed so much ambient magic that it is practically a living thing with emotions and a degree of sentience. Equal Rites has the witch Granny Weatherwax reaching out her mind and effectively borrowing it — i.e., a sort of benign possession which a witch may only do with the mind of a living thing. She reads its mind and discovers it is frightened and fearful of thunderstorms. Much the same happens in Sourcery, when the University dimly senses big trouble ahead, and doesn't like it.
  • Loony Librarian: Downplayed with the Librarian of Unseen University, who was turned into an orangutan by magical accident and has vigorously refused any attempt at turning back, thanks to the Super-Strength, agility, and rule-breaking his new form allows. He is very particular that people not refer to him as a monkey, given that orangutans are apes.
  • Loser Deity:
    • Bilious, the Oh-God of Hangovers, one of several new gods created by the temporary death of the Hogfather. His sole lot in life is to absorb the hangovers that should have gone to Bibulous, the God of Wine and Things On Sticks.
    • Herne The Hunted: about three feet tall with a worried and paranoid expression, he is the deity of all prey animals and his role in the divine scheme of things is to run away, very fast, from all the Gods of the Hunt.
    • Reg, God of Club Musicians, the patron of all struggling semi-successful musicians whose role in life is to eke a perilous living on the margins of success and lives in perpetual fear that they aren't going to get paid for the latest crummy gig in a craphole venue.
  • Loves Only Gold: Dwarfs in the Discworld are often accused of loving gold. They retort this is not true. They only say that so as to get into bed with it. Lords and Ladies clarifies that they actually prefer iron, it's just that gold is easier to make songs about. Especially when most of the lyrics are "gold".
  • Low Fantasy: Increasingly — starting around "Men at Arms", the focus shifts away from reality-warping threats and towards how a city like Ankh-Morpork would actually work. By "Going Postal" and "Making Money", we've got books about corrupt executives, bank fraud and the power of good press...that happen to also involve golems, wizards and banshees.
  • Loyal Phlebotinum: Wizards' staffs, and the Luggage. Both are made from sapient pearwood, a strange, sapient kind of magic lumber that is extremely loyal to its owner.
  • Lucky Seven: Inverted — eight makes many appearances as an occult number, most of them bad. Has a much stronger presence in the first two books, though.
    • The reduction in bad references to either may have to do with Two-Flower accidentally destroying the Temple of the Sender of Eight. He only wanted a picture...
    • It popped back in for a terrific Leaning on the Fourth Wall gag when Pterry finally started breaking Discworld books into chapters. In Going Postal, the chapter in between 7 and 9 is titled "Chapter 7A."
  • Lying by Omission:
    • In A Hat Full of Sky, "never lie, but don't always tell the truth" is among the pieces of advice Miss Tick gives Tiffany.
    • Monstrous Regiment: Jackrum oftens says "Upon my oath, I am not a dishonest/violent man". While the intented meaning is "but look what you made me do", the truth is that she is actually a woman.
    • Thief of Time: "No monk here knows deja-fu! I'd soon hear about it if they did." This is true. None of the Time Monks know how to use time itself as a weapon in martial arts. Lu-Tze, however, is not a Time Monk...
    • Carrot does this surprisingly frequently when negotiating with hostile characters. However, he has never (as far as anyone can prove) told a direct lie. In fact, he has a tendency to use the truth as a weapon. Both he and his it's-complicated Angua have told someone impeding their progress that unless the person stands down, they'll be forced to carry out the orders they were given regarding resistance, and that they'll regret it terribly if they do, but they won't have any choice. In the circumstances an implied threat is very clear - Shame If Something Happened. However, the orders on both occasions were "leave the offending party alone, and see if you can find a workaround in this morass." The people they're sort-of threatening never notice.
      "Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards."
    • The witches at the end of Wyrd Sisters are quite clear in their own minds that they've told everyone the truth; Tomjon and the Fool are half-brothers, and Verence is the older. If people want to assume that Verence is therefore the illigitimate son of the King and Mrs Fool, and entitled to claim the throne if Tomjon doesn't want it, rather than Verence being the illegitimate son of the elder Fool and the Queen, that's their problem.

    Tropes M to P 
  • 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. In The Last Hero it is stated that if Cohen is successful in his plan to return fire to the gods (with interest) it will disrupt all magic on the Disc for two years. When someone suggests that they can get by without magic, Ponder Stibbons replies that without magic the seas will run dry, sun crash into the Disc, etc etc. And this will not take place over two years, but within a few minutes. Magic isn't just coloured lights, it holds the Disc together.
  • Magic A Is Magic A: As Moist von Lipwig observes in Going Postal, the eventual cost of doing everything by magic (magic having a very steep bill even for little things) is the reason that life on the Disc evolved steampunk technologies for the advancement of society, rather than Functional Magic. Whenever there needs to be a reason why the large number of highly skilled wizards of Unseen University cannot counter a problem with magic, one of the standard limitations is that it takes precisely the same amount of work (in the physics sense) to do something by magic as by any other means, and all the other mundane limitations (like action-reaction) as well. The result is that a wizard trying to pick a lock by magic expends most of his effort to keep his brain from squirting out of his ears. Moreover flying without aids (ie, a carpet or broomstick) is theoretically impossible for the same reason, although knocking a big weight off a high place and going up when it goes down is possible.
  • Magical Camera: Iconographs are little more than boxes containing a very tiny imp with a sketchpad and set of paints. Because the imps have no imagination whatsoever, the images they create are accepted as objective. The flash works by frightening a captive Salamander, a magical lizard which absorbs light and can release it suddenly.
  • Magic Is a Monster Magnet: Wizards tend to attract Eldritch Abominations.
  • Magical Library: The library of Unseen University leads to other dimensions thanks to the sheer weight of accumulated knowledge distorting the space-time continuum. This is known as L-Space. The library itself is pretty much a universe of its own with all the magical books, library creatures such as the thesaurus and lost tribes of research students inside. One of the more disturbing features of the Library is the way the dome of the Library is always overhead, no matter how far you seem to move on the floor in any direction. This is compounded by the fact that shelves of books, and occasional people among the shelves of books, are also clearly visible on the ceiling around the dome.
  • Magical Sensory Effect: Magic has a unique color, octarine, that non-magical people can't see.
  • Magical Seventh Son: Except on Discworld, the magical number is eight, and the eighth son of an eighth son is a wizard. And the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son is... very, very bad news.
  • Magical Society: Unseen University serves this function, and is implied to be responsible for the fact that there aren't any magical wars any more, since all the wizards are busy with bureaucratic politics and enjoying the comforts of their station. (It is noted that in the bad old days, "the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'".) Witches, on the other hand, are much less organised, and many of them seem to like it that way.
    The basic unit of wizardry is the Order or the College or, of course, the University. The basic unit of witchcraft is the witch, but the basic contiguous unit, as has already been indicated, is the cottage. — Lords and Ladies
  • Magical Weapon: There are a large number of magical weapons with a wide variety of properties, but perhaps the most interesting case is an inversion: Carrot's sword is so non-magical that it's more real than anything else on the Disc, and thus can cut through almost anything.
  • Magitek:
    • Due to his job before writing, Pratchett likes to compare magic to nuclear physics, hence the High Energy Magic Building and Ponder's staff talking of splitting the thaum. Known flavours of the thaum are: up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.note 
    • And then there's... Hex.
  • Master Poisoner: Lord Downey, head of the Assassins' Guild, is rumoured to be this. There is no record of anyone Lord Downey may have wanted to inhume ever being poisoned, however. Which may just indicate that he's really good at it.
  • 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; when Vetinari is poisoned in Feet Of Clay, Vimes calls in a horse vet to treat him, because many of Doughnut Jimmy's patients survive (and they have to, when the other option is telling a mob boss his prized and very valuable racehorse is dead).
    • Later on in the series, the Igors can provide effective medical treatment, but they're likely to return to claim payment in the form of body parts once the patient is no longer using them.
    • Dr. Lawn also seems to be subverting this trope in the city post-Night Watch. Of course, his methods come from Klatch, not the Sto Plains.
  • Menacing Museum: Many examples can be found in Ankh-Morpork. The Black Museum of the Guild of Assassins is given over to the contemplative study of inhumation, for instance, and celebrates the many and stylish ways in which clients have been eliminated. The museum of the Guild of Fools is built around the Hall of Faces. Every clown who ever was, and who currently is, has their unique face paint reproduced here on the surface of an egg - thousands upon thousands of them.
  • Men Can't Keep House:
    • Suggested several times to be the case with the City Watch, particularly the canteen. The arrival of female Watchmen didn't seem to have any effect.
    • Subverted in the case of dwarfs, as they tend to keep tidy homes no matter what sex (if any) they admit to being. Nor do you ever find rats or cockroaches infesting their houses, so long as the residents can hold a frying pan.
  • The Men in Black: The History Monks are "The Men in Saffron", hailing from "No Such Monastery".
  • Micro Monarchy: Lancre, in the Ramtop Mountains, and some of its neighboring kingdoms which are even smaller. Just about every flat spot in the Ramtops (of which there are precious few) is a kingdom. This has led to generational wars over getting hold of somewhere to store the coal.
  • Million to One Chance: Invoked whenever someone needs a long shot to happen. "Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten." (Subverted through the long discussion when some of the City Watch try to invoke this rule, by trying to arrange an exactly million-to-one chance. "No one ever said, 'It's a 999,943-to-one chance but it just might work.")
  • Mining for Cookies: Treacle mines are mentioned in several books, and Treacle Mine Road is a location in Ankh-Morpork. Terry Pratchett actually goes into a bit of detail as to how these occurred; the treacle seams are made of fossilised sugar cane. The Discworld Companion says that there were also treacle deposits under Genua, but the heat and moisture transformed them into rum springs.
  • Miraculous Malfunction: The best-case scenario of allowing Bloody Stupid Johnson to build anything. Except organs, those he can seem to do, although the UU one is a bit, powerful.
  • Misfit Mobilization Moment:
    • The reformation of the Night Watch into the City Watch, particularly in Men at Arms.
    • Any story with the wizards will see one.
    • Nanny Ogg's family is mentioned to do this if someone makes an unkind comment about any of them, even if it's a person they've been making comments about not minutes before. Or form a spontaneous mob when, say, the king wants the country's opinion on a new tax.
  • "Miss X" Pun: Miss Perspicacia Tick, a.k.a. Miss Tick, a witch, teacher, and "witch finder" who travels the lowlands identifying girls who have the gifts and potential to become witches so they can be properly trained. Her name is a pun on "mystic".
  • Modernized God: Gods Need Prayer Badly, so some out-of-style deities will do whatever it takes to get by. The ancient volcano goddess Lela reinvented herself as Anoia, Goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, and has actually managed a minor renaissance in her new position.
  • Mother Nature, Father Science: It's technically magic for both sides, but male (wizard) magic is shown in a more scientific light and tends to be about bending the forces of nature to the spellcaster's will. Female (witch) magic, on the other hand, tends to be more psychological and more about attuning yourself to nature.
    • Those attitudes can also be seen as the exact opposite: while wizardry is about learning and using that which has already been known for thousands of years, witchcraft is about intimidating magic into doing whatever the witch damn well pleases.
  • 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.
    • While Verence does make attempts at acting properly royal, he started as a lowly Fool and never quite leaves that behind, which suits just fine in a kingdom like Lancre. Early on Magrat discovers that he still sleeps on the floor.
  • Monster Modesty: Trolls mostly just wear a loincloth "to conceal whatever it was that trolls found it necessary to conceal". This is so much a part of their culture that male trolls will go to clubs to watch female trolls put on clothing. There's usually a riot by the second overcoat. There are four exceptions to this as of RaisingSteam: Detritus, who wears a watch uniform, Chrysophrase and Thunderbolt, who wear suits, and Mr Shine (the Diamond King) who is completely clothed. Given that the last one is made of solid diamond his reflective nature in any sort of light has been listed as "Blinding", but it's also noted that Mr Shine has been in hiding in Ankh Morpork until his debut in Thud! and he's consequently covered up to avoid being recognised. It would take a matter of seconds one surmises...
  • More than Just a Teacher:
    • The Guild of Assassins' School is staffed by some very scholarly, capable people often possessing more letters after their name than are actually in the name.
    • Susan has moved from being a governess to a teacher by Thief of Time. She is technically a duchess, as well as being Death's granddaughter for whom reality is somewhat bendable.
  • Morphic Resonance: Discworld has played a big part in popularising the phrase. Probably its most significant example is the law of magic that no shape-shifter, not even gods, can transform how their eyes look — so their eyes always provide a clue to their real identity or nature.
  • Mortality Grey Area: Golems are only animated as long as they have a chem (a paper with magic words) in their heads. Remove the chem and they're just very big humanoid statues with empty heads that creep everyone out (as Angua puts it, the living hate the undead and the undead loathe the unalive). It doesn't mean they don't have wants, however, and after the events of Feet of Clay it turns out putting a golem's bill of sale to itself along with its chem frees it from its need to have a master, and the golems start working to free themselves.
    • Dorfl argues with a bunch of priests that if they want to prove he's not alive, they can grind him down to the finest powder to find a single spark of life, but to make sure the test is fair, the same must be done to a fellow priest. The priests see the difficulty in the proposal, because the golem can just be remolded and baked to be restored.
  • Mugging the Monster:
  • Muggle in Mage Custody: An odd example in that the "muggle" is actually a wizard, but is rarely seen to use magic: Death's manservant Albert was once Alberto Malich, a very powerful wizard who decided to cast the Death-summoning ritual of Ash-Kente in reverse to gain immortality. Instead, he found himself dragged into Death's realm but took on the position of Crusty Caretaker there, as he had very little time left in reality and the other options for immortality were less than pleasant or likely to succeed.
  • Muggle–Mage Romance:
    • Not uncommon among witches. Magrat married Verence, the muggle king of Lancre. Nanny Ogg had a lot more romances, and ended up raising a large extended family.
    • Wizards by contrast are contractually obliged to avoid this, since they have a small chance of fathering the living embodiment of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity. There's mention of retired wizards pursuing romance, albeit quite carefully.
  • Mundane Utility: Wizards. All the time. It goes hand in hand with their disdain for work.
  • Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom:
    • Omnian names are half name, half psalm in the style of 16th century Puritans. Most go by the first word in their name, though.
    • Most Goblins. It's also a grave insult to give them a nickname, although some of the younger ones don't mind.
  • National Weapon: Dwarfs consider their battleaxes cultural artifacts, and will not part with them even when circumstances require them to relinquish all other weapons (at a diplomatic function, for instance).
  • Negatives as a Positive: it's a recurring theme that good witches know exactly who they are and how to apply themselves. Granny Weatherwax earns every ounce of her great Pride, and in The Wee Free Men, when the trainee witch Tiffany Aching is called selfish, she takes it as a motivation to protect everything she cares about.
    Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them!
  • Never Mess with Granny: It can be safely said that Terry likes his women strong. For every three women introduced in this vast series, two and a half are old ladies (whether little or otherwise) that can stop a running bull, and the rest are just like them, but younger. Of particular note are Granny Weatherwax, who put a demon in his place with a few threats, and Mrs. Cake (a medium, bordering on small), whom High Priest Ridcully compares to the things from the Dungeon Dimensions.
  • Noah's Story Arc: There's an Urban Legend about the founding of Ankh-Morpork that tells how a wise man foretold a Great Flood, gathered his family and hundreds of animals into a big ship, and rode it out. After a few weeks' sailing, the accumulated wastes from all the animals were filling up the vessel, so they tipped all the manure over the side, and built a city on the resulting dung-island.
  • Noble Tongue:
    • The Quirmian language is basically French and aristocratic young women generally go to boarding school in Quirm.
    • Latatian, the language of the ancient Ankh-Morporkian Empire and represented by Dog Latin, is still used by wizards, lawyers, and doctors, all of whom reckon that their professions are greatly enhanced if ordinary folk don't understand a word they're saying.
  • Non-Human Head: Gods are often noted as looking like humans wearing cheap Halloween masks. Offler the Crocodile-Headed God is the one seen most often, but, in Pyramids, the equivalent of the entire ancient Egyptian pantheon shows up.
  • 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, but even the Patrician doesn't know for sure.) He also left very quickly. The type of quickly that involves leaving behind a kidney and an ear hole.
    • There's also the oft-mentioned fate of Vetinari's predecessor, Mad Lord Snapcase, who wound up being hung up by his figgin. A figgin is a small cake, so either there's a bizarre case of linguistic drift going on, or there really is some horrifying element to a man being suspended alongside a teacake.
    • Quite a few unfortunate consequences of test-runs for Bloody Stupid Johnson's inventions, as well as a couple of Leonard of Quirm's, are implied to have been quite ugly.
  • No Sense of Humor:
    • Granny Weatherwax. She understands humor on a conceptual level, but has absolutely no sense of humor and has no understanding of how or why jokes work.
    • Death also has No Sense of Humor, being an anthropomorphic personification who doesn't understand human emotions. His brief attempts to inject humor into his work failed spectacularly.
      • Although he is getting better at it. "Since you believe in reincarnation, you'll be Bjorn again" was pretty good. Pity that the dwarf he told it to also had No Sense of Humor and didn't get that it was supposed to be a joke.
    • Part of the reason that the Fools' Guild is so spectacularly bad at being funny is because they religiously follow, in Gormenghastian tradition, the essays on punning, wit, jokes and humor written by Monsieur Jean-Paul Pune, who was run out of Quirm due to a combination of the (even more intense, at the time) literal-mindedness of his fellows and his own heavily implied ineptitude at actually being funny.
  • No Social Skills: Death fails spectacularly at relating to people.
  • Not So Extinct: A lot of standard fantasy creatures are extinct, though that's often synonymous with "trapped in a parallel dimension".
    • Giant, flying, fire-breathing dragons are shunted off in a dimension of their own. Their improbable biology requires magic to sustain, and the Discworld generally doesn't have enough magical energy around for them to exist anymore. There are exceptions, small pockets of high magic where dragons survive, and individual dragons can be summoned if enough magical energy is pumped into them.
    • Elves are similarly stuck in their own dimension(s), although there are weak points where travel is possible — lots of them in the Ramtop mountains.
    • Orcs were the foot soldiers of the defunct Evil Empire, and it's revealed in Unseen Academicals that the people of Uberwald have been exterminating the few survivors. They haven't been entirely successful.
    • As early as The Colour of Magic, Rincewind is utterly astonished to learn that dryads still exist, since he thought all the magical races except elves and trolls were gone.
  • Nude Nature Dance: Alluded to, and then firmly averted more than once in the Discworld novels starring the three witches. Nanny Ogg is probably game, but... no. Just no.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Has its own page.
  • Oddly Small Organization:
    • In Lancre, 90% of the civil service posts, along with every military position, are held by Shawn Ogg.
    • The Ankh-Morpork City Watch, which in the first Watch book has a grand total of four people on the night shift, and in the final Watch book has a combined night and day watch of about 250. For a city of a million people. That's roughly one watchman for every four thousand people (for comparison, New York City's cop per capita ratio is about twenty times higher), and Vimes complains about how large the watch is, since he can no longer know every person under his command personally.
    • Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler founded his own guild, the Guild of C.M.O.T. Dibblers of which he is the head and only member, and he seems content to keep it that way. (After this happened, the laws governing formation of guilds was amended to prevent one-person guilds.)
  • Official Couple: Since the Discworld is mercifully short on romantic drama, any couple whose initial courtship forms a sub-plot in one book are likely to follow this trope for the remainder of the series. Prominent examples include Vimes/Sybil and Carrot/Angua in the City Watch books, Magrat/Verence in the Witches books, Moist/Adora in the Moist von Lipwig books and Mort/Ysabelle in the Death books (although the latter were Killed Off for Real in Soul Music, they counted as this before their deaths and are still alluded to in this way by other characters). While Tiffany and Roland were a bit young to start in with a romance right off the bat, later Tiffany Aching books see a touch of Will They or Won't They? develop between them, until eventually Official Couple status goes to Roland/Letitia and Tiffany/Preston instead.
  • Oh Look, More Rooms!: Death's Domain. The initial hallway is intimidating enough, but several of the rooms along it open up into cavernous chambers filled with books or hourglasses. Some get it worse than others. Entirely mundane people just see the entirely mundane bits. Those who see what's really there notice that the mundane bits in most rooms are tiny islands surrounded by vast oceans of empty floor...
  • Oh, My Gods!: Common, with the multiple gods the Disc sports. The dwarfs have their own, unique version — they don't believe in gods as such (Discworld dwarfs don't go in for belief, due to their lifestyles), but they have them anyway, because swearing to gods is better than going "Oh, Random Fluctuations In Space And Time!"
  • Oktoberfest: The human population of Überwald is pretty much this trope. Quaffingnote  of beer from ornate ceramic mugs with badly secured lids, whilst singing jolly songs like Ich bin ein Rattedarschedschwein, is a Running Gag
  • The Omnipresent: Death, as should be expected, considering that he's one entity responsible for everyone on the Disc. It doesn't come up too much, though.
  • One-Hour Work Week:
    • Seems to be all the wizards get up to these days, which is a pity since that would be Victor Tugelbend's dream job.
    • Colon and Nobby are technically on duty as much as the next watch officer but often call it quits sooner rather than later.
  • One-Steve Limit:
    • Played oddly with the Unseen University head faculty introduced in Moving Pictures: because they're known only by their titles, the first part of the title is effectively their first name, and so the Dean of Pentacles is the only Dean, the Lecturer in Recent Runes is the only Lecturer, the Chair of Indefinite Studies is the only Chair, and so on.
    • Taken outside and given a good kicking by the Feegles: "No'-As-Big-As-Medium-Sized-Jock-But-Bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock."
  • The One Who Made It Out: Lancre is "the place people come from to become successful somewhere else" (usually Ankh-Morpork). Notably, Lancre has produced a quite disproportionate number of notable (and not so notable) wizards. There's not usually a whole lot of entertainment in the evenings, particularly in the winter...
  • The Only Believer: This trope gets examined in a number of books.
    • The most direct and obvious case is Brutha in Small Gods. Despite Omnia being a theocratic state that is strictly monotheistic and worships the great god Om, Om is shocked to find that nobody actually believes in him. They have feelings about Om like hoping he's real, but what they actually believe in is the brutal church that rules Omnia in his name. The only actual believer is Brutha, a novice at the very bottom of the church hierarchy. Considering this is a world where Gods Need Prayer Badly, this causes all sorts of... interesting complications in the story and for Om.
    • In Night Watch Reg Shoe is the only believer in the idea of the revolution actually changing anything. Most others are presented as, at best, being much more cynical and pushing narrow agendas, or outright only looking for power for themselves. He is briefly broken by the realization that it's very much going to be a Full-Circle Revolution.
    • Played with somewhat in Monstrous Regiment. Plenty of people in Borogravia have practically religious faith in the Duchess, so much so that she is actually ascending to godhood, but in the rag-tag military unit of the viewpoint characters, even though everyone has to pay her lip service only Wazzer believes... and Wazzer believes so hard that it's often unsettling.
  • Only Sane Man: Most protagonists have moments of this, but special mention should go to Ponder Stibbons.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    • Death is generally a calm and collected speaker, so whenever he loses his temper (at, say, New Death in Reaper Man), you know shit just got real.
    • Vetinari plays Sam Vimes like a fiddle and gets him to do the best job possible, but mainly by pissing him off first. Usually after such a meeting, Vimes would punch the wall outside Vetinari's office. Until one day he doesn't...
    • An upset Nanny Ogg is bad to see, as Agnes notes in Carpe Jugulum. A Nanny Ogg that misses a chance to mock Agnes' Accidental Innuendo, on the other hand, is rather dread-inducing, because then something is seriously wrong.
  • Original Man: The first humans to live on the disk were much more powerful than the ones that currently live on the disk. The gods remade mankind to be easier to deal with.
  • Our Banshees Are Different: The Disc has two different varieties of Banshee. It's not clear that they are really related; they appear in different books, and behave very differently. Pratchett may just have used the same word twice, years apart, for two different ideas, or in-setting, the word may just have been used for two different entities with terrifying cries and an association with death that were understandably confused by people.
    • There's "civilized" type, which as per the myth typically wails when someone is about to die — though the one we meet has a some kind of shyness problem or speech impediment, so he just slips a note under their door. This type seems to have a supernatural sense for when someone is doomed, and is probably an actual supernatural creature. The one depicted hung out with the local undead support group; it's never really established if he was undead himself or just spending time with the other supernatural outcasts, but the term is rather broad in that universe in any case (including werewolves and bogeymen for example), with the definition seemingly being "it often comes from Uberwald and it's really, really hard to kill".
    • The "feral" variety seems to be a natural creature — the only sentient species on the Disc that has evolved natural flight. They also wail when someone is about to die, but in this case it's generally because they're cutting out the middleman and hunting you down themselves. Basically, they're efficient predators with a cry that can be used to terrify prey. The one we meet works as a hired killer, and is good at its job.
  • Our Better Is Different: The dwarfs use "lower" as a synonym for "better" where humans & co would use "higher". For example, their ruler is known as the "Low King". They also invert light and dark in terms of their desirability and descriptive uses.
    "The first Brother walked toward the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws and he was enlightened. The second Brother walked toward the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened." — from the Discworld dwarf Creation Myth
  • Our Dragons Are Different:
    • Swamp dragons are unstable, ugly cute little runts that 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. They seem to have retreated to fantasy but can show up under certain circumstances which always involve a lot of belief and/or magic. Examples are the Wyrmberg and Guards! Guards! Though never stated, the implication seems to be that the dragons left due to the lessening of magical energy on Discworld, possibly due to the lack of Sourcerers.
    • Moon dragons live on the Discworld's moon, which has breathable air and silvery, carbon-rich plant life that causes moonlight. The dark, blackened side of the moon is caused by the dragons' method of propulsion, which is more acceptable to physics than the noble dragons' fire breath, but less so to everyone else. It's implied that the swamp dragons are the result of interbreeding between noble dragons and moon dragons, creating a rather sad creature that knows it shouldn't physically exist, but has to anyway. Up until it explodes, that is.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Discworld dwarfs started out as an intentionally Flanderized parody of this trope. Later books subverted it by introducing Yiddish elements to their culture, among other things. Becomes a Deconstructed Trope with the introduction of Dwarf counter-culture (openly female dwarfs who wear leather skirts and braids in their beards) as well as Dwarf fundamentalists who violently oppose anything non-dwarfish.
  • Our Elves Are Different: And a race of Always Chaotic Evil fantastical sociopaths. They live in a parallel universe to the Disc called Fairyland and serve as a contrast to the Auditors. The Auditors are dull, bureaucratic demons who wanted everything to be orderly; elves are magical alien monsters that, unable to understand basic concepts like love or empathy, can only relate to other beings by causing them misery and spreading chaos.
  • Our Gargoyles Rock: Living statues that eat pigeons and can stare down anything, used as watchmen and clacks operators.
  • Our Gods Are Different: Gods on the Disc come in two basic varieties — your average God, who is a short-tempered git with as much self-control as a kid with a magnifying glass, and Creators, who create worlds and/or life. The Disk's Creator was apparently a pretty absent-minded one.
  • Our Imps Are Different: Imps are tiny green humanoids used to power Magitek devices like cameras (they have no imagination, so they paint what they see) and watches.
  • Our Nymphs Are Different: Dryads appear in The Colour of Magic, where they live in pocket dimensions within trees and are extremely protective of their homes. Since they're stated to be vanishingly rare, it's possible that their absence from later books is because they've gone extinct. They're also unusual in that they aren't Always Female; as the dryad Druella puts it, "Where do you think acorns come from?".
  • Our Pixies Are Different: The NacMacFeegle. Rowdy, foul of mouth (if anyone can interpret them), drunken, prone to violence and generally a four or five inches tall variant on a theme of the Violent Glaswegian. They tolerate being described as Pictsies, but Gods help anyone who calls them "fairies". Then again, fairies also exist in Terry Pratchett's Elf-realm. They may look like enchanting tiny women with wings — but the Fey are really an insectoid hive-creature akin to hornets and with a taste for meat.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: All vampire myths are true in Discworld, but don't necessarily apply to any given vampire. There seem to be only two things that are true of all Disc vampires: their addiction to blood, which can be overcome only by finding something else to obsess over, and the belief that spelling their name backwards is a great way to fool people.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: They have great regenerative capabilities, are only truly vulnerable to silver and fire, 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. (Being effectively a human/wolf mix, they also have a nagging tendency to compromise and think like dogs.) They're considered undead on the basis of "They're big and scary, they come from Überwald, and they don't die when you stick them with a sword, what more do you want?" There are distinct varieties, too, within the traditional variety and without. There are yennorks, who are naturally born werewolves who are stuck permanently in one shape or the other. In Reaper Man we're introduced to a pair of werewolves who more fit the Hollywood 'big humanoid mound of fur and muscle' stereotype, with an additional twist that one of them is a regular wolf most of the time, the other a beautiful girl, and they meet one another half-way one week a month. The werewolves of Discworld also illustrate a rarely-considered point: Humans hate werewolves. Wolves hate werewolves so much more. (This is because humans use werewolves as an excuse to kill wolves, and the opposite never occurs.) A lone werewolf is relatively safe mixing in a human community. A lone werewolf who stumbles into a pack of wolves generally has a very short life expectancy. An ability to spread the the condition through bites has been frequently mentioned, but never shown; from context it may be a myth.
  • Our Witches Are Different: Wizardry and witchcraft are separate forms of magic that are mostly gender divided, but this is a social split related to prejudices on both sides of the fence. Exceptions exist, such as the early mention of wizards in Krull not caring much either way. Terry Pratchett's opinion, at least referenced in a narrative aside, is wizardry being systematic was more suited to men while witchcraft being initiative/emotional was more suited to women. Interestingly, despite her initial reservations, Granny Weatherwax is eventually convinced that Eskarina's mindset is wizard-like and that trying to shape it into witchcraft simply because she's female is a bad idea.
  • Outscare the Enemy: A frequently recurring joke, showing up independently in Interesting Times, Lords and Ladies, and Jingo, among others.
  • Overly Long Name: Sir Pterry is fond of these. Vampires, Nac Mac Feegle, and a number of others can have very long names. Even Nobby. And, eventually, His Grace, His Excellency, the Duke of Ankh Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Blackboard Monitor and King of the River.
  • Painting the Medium: Has its own page.
  • Pelts of the Barbarian: The standard outfit of the barbarian heroes of the Discworld comprises a leather loincloth, a few scraps of metal, and an optional fur or leather cloak. Spoofed with Nijel the Barbarian in Sourcery, who is learning barbarian heroing from a book, and wears his loincloth over the top of woollen longjohns.
  • The Perils of Being the Best: This is a point that gets brought up in many, many, books. Having a reputation for being the best means you have to deal with all the inconveniences of that reputation. First, you have to live up to your reputation. Second, you have to deal with all the challenges it brings you, whether it's trying to carry out impossible challenges or dealing with everyone who wants to prove that they're better than you. A few specifics:
    • Granny Weatherwax has to deal with every magic challenge simply because she is the best witch, even if she doesn't want to do it.
    • Jason Ogg, the blacksmith of Lancre is the best blacksmith and farrier on the Disc, but the cost is he must take up every challenge; from the stupid (having to shoe an ant — he made an anvil from a pinhead) to the exceptional (forging silver shoes for a Unicorn and shoeing the beast). He simply is not allowed to refuse a commission.
    • Vimes is the best policeman on the Disc, which means if there is a crime, even outside his jurisdiction, or while he's on vacations, if he hears about it he must investigate. Furthermore, he has to live up to his reputation as the most honest cop on the Disc, even when it would easier and more convenient not to do so. However, Vimes is aware that not just the Ankh-Morpork watch but cops all over the Disc consider him to be The Paragon, and he's frequently been in situations where he's had to put his own life in danger to avoid breaking that pedestal.
  • Phrase Catcher: The Auditors tend to provoke talk of "malignity".
  • Pimped-Out Cape: The wizards wear very fancy robes.
  • Pimped-Out Dress: Wizards in full regalia probably count. They are likened to what would happen if you found a way to inflate a Bird of Paradise covered in glitter.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The Wizards are the senior staff of the Unseen University, and will do anything, anything, to avoid actually having to teach students. The very concept terrifies them more than the threat of Great Big Green Things With Teeth.
  • Plant Hair: Trolls are made of rock and sometimes cultivate moss and lichens on their heads.
  • 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 Sourcery 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 to keep him in charge, or at the very least, make removing him from power an unsavory prospect. See Vetinari Job Security. A case could be made for Vetinari being just as crazy as his predecessors, with the silver lining that his mania is an obsessive desire to see the city run smoothly. It helps that he has the inventive genius to back it up.
  • Prefers Proper Names: Goblins have elaborate, poetic names and consider it a deadly insult to abbreviate a name, so they either don't know or don't care that non-goblins don't usually go on a Full-Name Basis.
  • Primitive Clubs: The club is the cultural weapon of the trolls, ranging from a simple lump of wood (sometimes with a nail in it) to an entire uprooted tree, depending on the size of the troll.
  • Professional Killer: Played with. Ankh-Morpork has an Assassins' Guild, but assassins have a certain style and code, involving wearing lots of black. There are plenty of Psychos For Hire, and if they're titled at all, they're just plain old "killers". Though since the Assassins' Guild is not fond of freelancers, in a very short time most of them wind up as plain old dead. The Assassins seem more or less indifferent to those who are Axe-Crazy for free, but if they start making money from it... There is also indications that the guild may only take a dim view of hired killers taking down people of certain classes, specifically those that conventionally hire Assassins. They don't take commissions on just anyone, or just from anyone. Assassins are also loath to kill unless paid to. Their guild motto translates to "Never kill without payment".
  • Prophecy Armor: Wizards and witches know when they're going to die, though wizards are forever trying to cheat death through various means, none of them successful in the end. Witches tend to use the time to make sure their cottage isn't messy and tidy up the place for their replacement.
  • Psmith Psyndrome: The Igors are all names Igor (or Igorina), but always know which one is being referred to.
  • Puny Humans: If anything, this is played straighter in the Discworld books than in most fantasy. Most sapient races are flat out better than humans: dwarfs are tougher, stronger, and live longer (though Carrot, a human raised by dwarfs, is described as a dwarf scaled to 200%, so the strength bit is not inherent but more due to them working out by constantly mining), trolls and golems are near indestructible and incredibly strong (and trolls are incredibly intelligent when in cooler temperatures), vampires have all their standard strengths and can even learn to replace their lust for blood, werewolves are extremely capable in combat and have fantastic regenerative capabilities, pictsies are unbelivably strong and ferocious (gnomes are described as being as strong as a human despite being the size of a Barbie doll), Igors (if they count as non-human) are all brilliant surgeons and also great healers, and orcs can only be called superbeings. Humans do, however, seem to be the only race that produces wizards, witches, or sourcerers. Even one of the latter can potentially invert this trope. They're also the most numerous and gregarious, and have the most infectious culture. They're also the most innovative. A brief mention of how the "first men" all but destroyed the Disc in a fit of pique immediately after their creation suggests that the Puny Humans trope was subsequently invoked by their divine makers so that they wouldn't do it again. Among other things they were made considerably smaller.

    Tropes Q to T 
  • Quack Doctor: Every paid doctor in Ankh-Morpork. Mainly on account of the "paid" bit; their sole aim is keeping their patients alive long enough to get paid, and nothing more. Actually keeping them alive past that is a toss-up at best, and deaths that may ensue are just shrugged off as the "will of the gods". Vets are more reliable for keeping humans alive, because a vet knows if he loses a horse the last thing he's likely to hear is a voice from a dark alley saying "Mr. Chrysoprase is very upset..."
  • Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything: "Because of quantum" is a standard Hand Wave on the Disc. The interesting thing is that it's explicitly used in the same way as "magic" is used in Real Life, but on the Discworld, magic is definable, closely studied and quite well understood. (Until it blows up in your face, that is.) But anything that really doesn't make sense and can't be explained, that's probably quantum.note 
  • Quitting to Get Married: Gender-flipped by wizards and witches, as wizards aren't expected to continue wizardry if they get married, but witches have no such restriction. Dr. Earwig, a wizard, left to get married, and Ridcully even says that he considers a wizard doing this to be "not retiring, it's the same as dying!"
  • Rain of Something Unusual: On certain parts of the planet rains of fish are spotted occasionally, as a result of the Disc's Background Magic Field. When the field is exacerbated, one might encounter more exotic and dangerous things, like doorknobs.
  • Rape, Pillage, and Burn:
    • It's been tried several times in Ankh-Morpork's past. The two standard results are: A) The invaders find themselves leaving the city several days later with confused expressions, armloads of tacky souvenirs, and suspiciously light wallets, or B) The city gains a new ethnic neighborhood and, eventually, some really interesting restaurants.
    • Being old school barbarian heroes, Cohen and his Silver Horde have this as their MO. Being really old school barbarian heroes, they occasionally forget what order to do it in and Cohen has to remind the rest of the Horde which things to rape, and which to burn down.
  • Reclining Venus: Discussed and taken up to eleven as a comment on the foibles of the art and cultural world. The Royal Art Gallery has an impressive collection of female nudes, for instance, both in art and statuary, and it is noted that the carpet in front of them is worn down to the underlay by the sheer pressure of visiting crowds, who are unaccountably disinterested in landscapes or still lives that don't feature female nudes. A Snark Knight notes that if it doesn't have a strategically placed urn or a length of gauze in the picture, it is therefore Pornography but if it does, it is elevated to Art. There is also an amateur art group, the Ankh-Morpork Fine Art Appreciation Society, who regularly attend classes to appreciate the female nude; some members even remember to sharpen their pencils or to dip the brush into the paint occasionally.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: The eyes of golems glow an unnerving red. A subversion since they're not evil, but people sure take it like they are.
  • Red Herring: Usually at least one per Watch book. Notably in Feet of Clay, in which they investigate the non-fatal poisoning of Lord Vetinari, and have to laboriously rule out everything. Ideas which temporarily sounded good include 'it's the cutlery', 'it's his diary', and 'it's the wallpaper'.
  • Reference Overdosed: Because the nature of the series is somewhat parodic, every book is full of Shout Outs and subverted, played with and deconstructed tropes. Soul Music and Moving Pictures in particular contain musical and movie references on almost every page.
  • Resurrective Immortality:
    • Vampires can be killed in a number of different ways, but will always regenerate when they eventually come into contact with blood.
    • Werewolves have a lesser degree of the same quality, provided their death didn't involve silver weapons or a lot of flame and, presumably, howling.
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Mentioned many times, but especially in Interesting Times and Night Watch; a revolution only leaves blood and death in its wake, and changes nothing in the long run.
  • "Risk"-Style Map: Used in the board game Ankh-Morpork.
  • Roadkill for Dinner: Mrs. Bradshaw's Guidebook to the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Railway mentions that the temple of Aniger, Goddess of Squashed Animals (mentioned in The Last Hero as growing in popularity due to faster coaches and better roads, and now even more so due to the railway) sells a book of track-kill recipes.
  • Rock Monster: Trolls are definitely made of rock, although their personalities are not particularly monstrous.
  • Rock Theme Naming: All trolls are named in some way after rocks or minerals. Female trolls may have the names of precious stones (such as "Ruby"), whereas males tend to be named for more mundane minerals or geological terminology (such as "Detritus"). Trolls even grow to look like the specific minerals for which they are named, making these Prophetic Names — a phenomenon which is called "metamorphorical rock" in-setting, but which isn't actually understood by anyone there. One book, on the other hand, features a troll called Big Jim Beef — which is explained as a "macho" nickname, similar to a human being called Rocky.
  • Rubber-Band History: There are some instances of time travel of various kinds: Dios in Pyramids, Eric, the wizards in The Last Continent, Vimes in Night Watch, and Death and Susan use it on occasion (though Thief of Time is more about time manipulation than travel). In these cases, history in the Discworld is surprisingly resilient (see Mort). Or maybe because of quantum, we only see the universe where the Discworld equivalent of Hitler winning (Ankh-Morpork being conquered in Jingo, the coming of the ice giants, the Apocralypse, etc.) does not happen.
    • However, Thief of Time makes it explicit that Discworld history is a mess that's been patched together by the History Monks.
    • And the trope is actually averted in Small Gods. Lu-Tze converts a century of war and a vicious, totalitarian religion into a century of peace and a religious debate society by simply sweeping dung into a pile in just the right place. It obviously helps that he's a History Monk.
  • 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.
  • Running Gag:
    • "Tiffany Aching was Aching all over".
    • References to Leonard of Quirm's painting of the "Mona Ogg", whose teeth follow you around the room.
    • Vetinari will often tell whoever he's talking to to look out a nearby window at what Ankh-Morpork has to offer, in the hopes that they will see Ankh-Morpork the way he sees it, as a great city all things considered, but usually they get sidetracked by fog obscuring the view or a dog peeing in an alley or something equally pointless.
    • A variety of the deliberately-spaced phrase, "that was a pune [sic], or play on words," often appear in the books whenever someone feels the need to emphasize said Incredibly Lame Puns, particularly when they are already quite blatant to the audience and people around them.
    • 'This was X. X was not simply the absence of Y. It was where you took Y and went all the way out the other side to come up with X.'
    • 'In [Character]'s mind, X was something that happened to other people.'
    • Any book with Nanny (and a few other books) will have someone tricked into drinking scumble, made from apples. Well, mostly apples.
    • Anything that can be seen as shadow puppets draws the comment "Do deformed rabbit, it's my favorite."
    • The Unseen University has a new Archchancellor in every book until Ridcully arrives in Moving Pictures and proves unkillable. Wizards believe strongly in Klingon Promotion, although not to the point of, say, missing a meal.
    • Occasionally, someone will say (usually to a wizard) "you can't [do X], there's a rule -" only for the character to do it anyway and say "actually, it's more of a guideline". (This may be a Call-Back to Usenet, where pedantic idiots would often flame others for "breaking the rule" that signatures "must" be no more than four lines; in vain would more sensible people point out that this was actually a guideline, drawn up in and for the days when there was no high-speed broadband, and the modems were slow enough that an extra line or two actually made a noticeable difference.)
    • Vimes, who can't stand the nobility and loathes the very concept of kingship, has increasingly-impressive titles foisted off on him as the Watch books progress. This joke reaches its apex in Snuff, in which he's declared King ... but (thankfully) only of the River, as an honorarium for steering the Fanny through a dam slam.
    • In the later books, the inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork have become aware that there is a werewolf in the City Watch...but for some reason, most assume that it is Nobby Nobbs. Nobby actually has papers from the Patrician certifying that he's "probably human", his appearance causing that to be in doubt often enough to make it worth the trouble of carrying them around.
    • Moist von Lipwig keeps stealing Drumknott's pencils.
    • Any time fire is mentioned the narration will comment on the many times buildings in Ankh-Morpork, and often the entire city, have been burned down for the insurance money, which is a recurring Call-Back to the first book in which that very thing happens almost immediately after Twoflower introduces the concept of fire insurance to the city.
    • Any mention of the river running through Ankh-Morpork will likely be followed by a colorful description of the river's consistency. A very quick person could run across its surface, and actually sinking in it would take considerable effort. And that's before considering all the waste that gets dumped into it.
    • Any mention of Death having an expression on his face (usually a grin) is likely to be immediately followed by the narration noting that being a skull with no muscles, Death's face cannot change expressions, but at the moment Death actually wanted to make that expression.
  • Sacred Scripture: There are many: The Book of Om, The Vengeful Testament of Offler, The Cenotine Book of Truth, The Scrolls of Wen the Eternally Surprised, and The Living Testament of Nuggan (the only holy book to be published in a ring binder for frequent updates).
  • Safe Under Blankets: Weaponized against bogeymen (the traditional "bump in the night" monster): because putting yourself under a blanket causes them to go away, putting one under a blanket (or even a square of fabric) gives them an existential crisis.
  • Samurai Shinobi: Played for Laughs. The portrayal of Agatea causes all the Japanese and Chinese tropes to bleed together promiscuously and randomly. If it is viewed in the West as a Weird Japanese Thing, it will turn up in Terry Pratchett's Agatea. In Interesting Times, the almost-hero Rincewind spends a lot of time evading warriors, guards and generally annoyed people who combine aspects of samurai, ninja, regular footsoldier and even sumo wrestler.
  • Sand Is Water: The Dehydrated Ocean. Technically not sand but a fourth state of water that occurs in a high density magical field.
  • The Sandman: Like the real world, the Discworld has a Sandman who sends children to sleep with a bag of magic sand. Unlike the real world, the Discworld version doesn't bother taking the sand out of the bag first.
  • Santabomination: Soul Music offhandedly mentions the Hogfather, the local Santa Claus equivalent who goes around giving gifts of meat to good children, and bags of bloody bones to bad children.
    There is a song about him. It begins: "You'd better watch out..."
    • Hogfather uses him as a central figure (or rather the central victim of the Auditors' plots). It turns out that his sleigh is drawn by massive boars instead of cute little pigs and he lives in a castle made entirely of bones, and started out as a human king sacrificed to ensure the winter would end soon.
  • Saved by the Coffin:
    • In Pyramids, when Teppic rescues Ptraci from prison, he hides her in an empty sarcophagus, leaving it open a crack. The next morning, the high priest Dios comes along, spots the slightly ajar coffin, triumphantly has the guards open it, to reveal... wood shavings. Ptraci had gone out earlier to answer nature's call, and once the confused Dios had left (even checking the sarcophagus containing the king's mummy), went back into hiding.
    • In Carpe Jugulum, Agnes Nitt blags her way into a castle being taken over by vampires by hiding in a coffin being ferried in by cart. The vampires' guards assume this is a delivery of bedroom furniture and do not bother to check.
  • Scienceville:
    • The city of Ankh-Morpork has the Street of Alchemists, so named for being the site of the frequently-rebuilt Alchemists' Guild headquarters. Outside of Unseen University, this is the district best known for professional thinkers and tinkerers; unfortunately, given the alchemists dabble in extremely volatile subjects with only a modicum of caution, the guild hall is periodically blown sky high by experiments gone wrong, and exists in a state of perpetual repair.
    • The city of Ephebe is one massive case of this: a parody of classical Athens, it's home to philosophers of all kinds, many of whom can be found in the process of arguing, experimenting, and leaping naked out of the bath in the wake of their latest discovery. It was also home to the second-largest library in the world before the Omnians burnt it to the ground in Small Gods. Thankfully, Unseen University's librarian was able to rescue several priceless volumes.
  • Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!:
    • Gnomes are particularly feared because "They had an inbuilt resistance to rules. This didn't just apply to the law, but to all the invisible rules that most people obeyed unthinkingly, like 'Do not attempt to eat this giraffe'"
    • Likewise General Tacticus: "He'd brought back heaps of spoils, lots of captives and, almost uniquely among Ankh-Morpork's military leaders, most of his men. Vimes suspected that this last fact was one reason why history didn't approve. There was a suggestion that this was, in some way, not playing fair."
    • Jonathan Teatime in Hogfather is a terror amongst the Assassin's Guild because he approaches all of his assignments with an "extreme prejudice" mentality (read: Leave No Survivors, in the goriest fashion possible) instead of following the Guild's rules (read: we kill the people you pay us to kill and no more, and there's people we won't kill no matter what).
    • Carcer Dun in Night Watch is not, technically, insane. It's merely that he's realized that all those little rules that keep society ticking over nicely only apply to you if you let them, and therefore the only thing between him and murdering a coach full of accordion players for shits and giggles is his own inhibitions. He is, in fact, more in tune with objective reality than the average man on the street; a sort of inverse psychosis if you will.
  • Second Verse Curse: Parodied — the second verse of We Can Rule You Wholesale, the anthem of Ankh-Morpork, purposely contains a bunch of mumbling since nobody will know it anyway.
  • Security Blanket: Weapon of choice against bogeymen. Because of the nature of belief, if you pull the covers over your head the bogeyman thinks you cease to exist... so if you put a bogeyman under a blanket it causes severe, crippling existential questions.
  • Sent Off to Work for Relatives: This is standard practice for dwarfs, who are sent to their already-established relatives (usually in Ankh-Morpork), learning a trade and sending money home. However, this doesn't seem to be a punishment, more of an immigration stereotype. Carrot Ironfoundersson was sent to join the Watch as he was a human raised by dwarfs.
  • Self-Proclaimed Liar: Casanunda's business card lists, among his other talents, "Outrageous Liar".
  • Serious Business:
    • Humor, as far as the Fools' Guild is concerned. They have incredibly strict guidelines (okay, rules) concerning the telling of jokes and being funny. Unauthorized joke-telling is severely punished, and the guild is almost completely devoid of warmth and happiness (and, ironically, humor). Graduates tend to be emotionally scarred for life.
    • Contrast the cheerful students of the Assassins' Guild (just next door). Some things are still Serious Business over there, but at least they can laugh. Assassins know that there are things that are serious (and they deal with some of the most serious things people who don't have to deal with magic deal with) and things that are not, how to tell the difference, and when each is in play.
  • Seriously Scruffy:
    • Samuel Vimes prefers to conform to this trope, although his wife is quite insistent that he maintain appearances after he marries her. One of his monologues even notes his disgust at a palace guard's sword, since it didn't show any nicks and dents and clearly never saw any use (as opposed to a well maintained sword which still showed wear and tear).
    • Lord Vetinari is a downplayed example, since he dresses in plain black clothes to avoid having to worry about his appearance in the first place.
  • Sheep in Sheep's Clothing:
    • Commander Vimes. Nobles assume (or just like to think) he's a jumped up copper who married his wife for money. Since he's a perspective character in several books, it's very clear that he loves his wife and hates the money.
    • Vimes's subordinate Captain Carrot also makes people wonder if his Incorruptible Pure Pureness isn't just a front. (It isn't, to the point where it's actually quite annoying to some characters.)
    • Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of the city, often frustrates the ruling classes by honestly having no vices they can use to exploit him (although unlike Carrot, he's much more of a Magnificent Bastard).
  • Short-Lived Leadership: "Loyala the Aaargh", whose reign lasted 1.13 seconds and failed to even last the length of his proclamation. There were also some unnamed other Ankh Morpork monarchs whose reigns did not last until the end of their coronation feasts; the longer lasting kings employed food tasters.
  • Shout-Out: So very many that, before wikis existed, the fandom collected them into The Annotated Pratchett File. The APF annotations list appears to have been discontinued after about two-thirds of the books; the torch has been carried on by the Terry Pratchett Wiki, which faithfully annotates the later books as well as adding extra detail to the earlier ones.
  • Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Somewhat common, especially with Rincewind. The guy would be so obviously right in his cynicism... but Twoflower would come out fine anyway, leaving Rincewind looking like an idiot.
  • Single-Season Country:
    • In The Fifth Elephant, Sam Vimes is on a diplomatic mission to Uberwald, the Discworld's equivalent to Eastern Europe. He ends up running for his life in deep snow in a deadly game of wits against werewolves. Just to establish where he is, and for Rule of Funny, he seeks refuge in a lonely isolated house with a cherry orchard populated by three gloomy sisters, who offer him the mysterious trousers of Uncle Vanya.
    • In Wintersmith, the elemental spirit of snow, ice, and deep winter is seen flying over a landscape of snow-covered trees in a blizzard, singing in Russian about the glories of snow.
  • Single-Species Nations: Zig-zagged: the dwarfs and trolls all give allegience to the Low King and the Diamond King respectively, but they exist in enclaves throughout human lands. Although the dwarfs seem to see their territory as one vast kingdom under the human lands, and can be offended if human governments believe their authority extends below ground level. The dwarfish capital of Schmaltzberg is beneath the Uberwaldean city of Bonk, and the government of Bonk apparently respects this difference. The trolls, meanwhile, (except those who have moved to the big city) mostly live in mountainous regions that human countries might claim, but are uninterested in actually occupying.
  • Single-Target Law: The Assassin's Guild School went through this on two separate occasions, with an initial rule—one banning the keeping of pet crocodiles, the other enforcing gender segregation in the dormitories—that then kept having to be amended to cover various forms of Rules Lawyering by individual pupils. In the latter instance there was an extreme case where the notation "A girl is defined as a young person of the female persuasion" was immediately followed by the rule "No matter how persuaded he feels, Jelks Minor in Form IV is a boy."
  • Skeleton Motif: Death, being an anthropomorphic personification of, well, death, lives in a pocket dimension where nearly everything — furniture, tools, his house, etc. — has some kind of bone-and-skull motif to it. Things that aren't are usually something that was brought in from the real world.
  • Slasher Smile:
    • Vimes.
    • The werewolves in Überwald.
    • Death (by dint of having no other option).
  • Slave Market: In the early stories, the setting in general and the city of Ankh-Morpork in particular are parodies of Sword and Sorcery fiction, so of course there are slave markets; in the first novel, they're one of the sights which Twoflower the tourist insists on visiting.
  • Most gods in the setting are a Type 4. Gods who present themselves to their followers as the King of All Cosmos (such as Om and Nuggan) end up as Sandbox Gods; all-powerful and all-seeing but only within the area where their worship is centred.
  • Sliding Scale of Continuity: Most of the books are level 4 (Arc-Based Episodic).
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Played with. The tone of the books and most of the characters are definitely on the cynical side. However, the universe itself is idealistic: A big thing amongst the Discworld is that it turns out to be an idealistic world populated by cynics who hope to achieve idealistic goals.
  • Slipping into Stink: Young Assassin Jocasta Wiggs is sent to target Sam Vimes. A few wrong steps after getting into Ramkin Manor, she ends up treading what is mainly water in the septic tank.
  • Smart Cop, Dumb Cop:
    • Men at Arms: Constables Cuddy (smart dwarf) and Detritus (dumb troll) have this dynamic initially. It's subverted once Cuddy discovers troll brains work better at lower temperatures, and invents a fan-equipped "thinking cap" for his partner.
    • The pairing of Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs also counts. Colon (old-time copper) frequently voices prejudices and half-baked observations; Nobbs, whilst by no means the brightest candle in the church, tends to demolish them effortlessly and in ways that suggest he is a Genius Ditz.
  • Smart People Play Chess: In the early novels, Vetinari plays chess. Later, when "Thud" is introduced and made out to be the Disc's chess analogue, Vetinari keeps a rare board in his viewing room and plays a friend via clacks.
  • Solitary Sorceress: All witches tend to live this way (Nanny Ogg lives 'alone', but not so alone that she can't yell for somebody to come over). In this setting they live literally and figuratively on the fringe of society, and so are far enough from their communities that they aren't seldom seen by normal people, but not too far to reach if their help is needed.
  • Sparse List of Rules: We only ever find out the sections of the Assassins' Guild's school rulebook dealing with "no keeping a crocodile in your dorm room" and "no boys in the girls' dorm and vice versa".
  • Spitty Speaker: Igors tend to spray everything in their immediate vicinity with spit whenever they have to pronounce the letter S. This isn't because they are rude, but because they purposefully speak with a lisp.
  • Spontaneous Crowd Formation: This is often called the official pastime of Ankh-Morpork. No matter what the citizenry are doing, if something interesting is going on, they will stop to watch it. As you might imagine, tends to transform into The Freelance Shame Squad regularly.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
    • According to Word of God, any book set in Ankh-Morpork will eventually morph into a City Watch novel, no matter what the original plan — which is presumably why so many of the later Wizards books involve them travelling away from the city. Moist von Lipwig was created specifically to counter this effect, since it's in his interests to avoid the Watch wherever possible, but even Raising Steam falls victim to this, with Moist and Vimes essentially dual leads.
    • A similar situation obtains with Granny Weatherwax and the Ramtops, which is why the witch protagonist of The Wee Free Men lives in a previously-undepicted part of the Disc instead of the region where most of the Disc's witches are found — she needed to live far enough from Granny that she had a chance to save the day herself before Granny arrived to take over.
  • Squirrels in My Pants:
    • It's mentioned in a few books that putting Ferrets (or Weasels) down your trousers is a popular rural entertainment. In I Shall Wear Midnight there is much disappointment when the man who does it doesn't show up for a fair. This is actually a real "sport".
    • This is an attack strategy for the Nac Mac Feegle.
  • Squishy Wizard: All wizards on the disc are this by default. They love food, get winded rather easily, and many of them are also rather old. All of these traits are actually encouraged by wizard culture, and Mustrum Ridcully (Archancellor of the the Unseen University) is considered extremely eccentric for his enjoyment of exercise-heavy activities.
    • Averted by Rincewind and the Librarian. The former has spent the majority of his life running away from things, and the latter is an orangutan. Possibly also by the wizards of the continent XXXX, and certainly by Bengo Macaronanote , who is athletic enough to be the backbone of the University's football team.
    • Although he isn't technically a wizard (as he keeps deliberately failing his final exams), Victor Tugelbend also avoids this out of sheer laziness. (He finds it easier not to carry all that extra weight around.)
    • However, until the accession of Archchancellor Ridcully created a sort of detente, these Squishy Wizards spent a lot of time making each other go squish — so Hyper-Awareness and Manipulative Bastard tendencies were survival traits.
  • Stark Naked Sorcery: It is mentioned that the myth of witches performing rites skyclad was invented by pervy old men with active imaginations. Some younger witches attempt it but usually give it up after one or two bouts of hypothermia.
    Not actually naked, or skyclad as it was rather delightfully called, because Magrat had no illusions about the shape of her own body and the older witches seemed solid across the hems, and anyway that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The books said that the old-time witches had sometimes danced in their shifts. Magrat had wondered about how you danced in shifts. Perhaps there wasn’t room for them all to dance at once, she’d thought.
  • Stop Worshipping Me: The Lady. One of the few examples of this trope in a universe where Gods Need Prayer Badly. Explained by the fact that everyone believes in luck, even if no one worships it. There is a passing mention of an attempt by a group of gamblers to worship The Lady. They all died in a series of sudden, improbable events.
    • The Duchess as well. People pray for her to intercede with the country's god, leaving her unable to act directly but horribly aware of everyone's pain.
  • Stranded Invader: It's mentioned that Ankh-Morpork has been repeatedly conquered by barbarian invaders, but the city's mercantile spirit is such that said invaders assimilate very quickly until they're just another ethnic minority, complete with their own food shops and gang graffiti.
  • Suicidal Lemmings: A relative of the lemming called the Vermine. Due to being descended from those rodents who were a bit more careful about leaping off cliffs than their cousins, they now only leap from very small pebbles, abseil down cliffs and build small rafts to cross rivers.
  • Suicide Dare: Ankh-Morpork citizens spying a potential building jumper will start shouting advice on the best buildings to jump from. Played for Laughs, (like virtually everything else) in Ankh-Morpork.
  • Summon Binding: Parodied by the Lancre witches, who occasionally summon demons and ensure their compliance using whatever they have on hand, such as by threatening to whack one with the big copper ladle they used to summon it in the first place.
  • Super Doc: Igors are all master surgeons, able to reattach body parts with ease (particularly good ones are passed down through the family).
  • Supernatural Repellent: Parodied, especially in Carpe Jugulum, where much mirth is raised by recounting, in a Discworld context, all the things which Earth legends say are fatal to vampires. This ranges from the normal- garlic, and whatnot- to the more unorthodox- lemons, poppyseed, and carrots.
  • Supernatural Sensitivity: Strong magic leaves strong residue, to the point that especially strong magic can leave magical fields behind that warp reality and last for centuries. Wizards (and cats) have the ability to see octarine.
  • Super-Strength: The Nac Mac Feegle are strong enough to pick people up and throw them through the air, and it only takes four (one per hoof) to run off with a cow. While being six inches high. If we had their proportionate strength, human could pick up buildings.
  • Take Over the City: Many villains desire to conquer Ankh-Morpork. Subverted by Carrot Ironfoundersson, who has the 'right' to and almost certainly could (yes, even from Vetinari), but has opted not to.
  • Talking Animal: Usually due to the magical equivalent of radioactive waste. Examples that appear in multiple books include Gaspode the Wonder Dog and the puntastically named Quoth the raven.
  • Tap on the Head: This is frequently Played With. It's used to temporarily switch people off, sometimes for precise periods of time. However, the only people who do it correctly are either those with medical expertise (such as an Igor, who warns that it's too dangerous for amateurs to try) or long experience with knocking people out. In one book, a non-expert who attempts it accidentally kills his target.
  • Telecom Tree: Working to a deadline? Need a mob to storm the castle? Just tell a member of the Ogg family. The rest will take care of itself.
  • The Comically Serious: Death.
  • Those Two Guys: Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs.
  • Tom Swifty: The series is littered with them, most captured at The Annotated Pratchett File. Some examples include:
    "Pass me the shellfish," said Tom crabbily.
    "Let's look for another Grail!" Tom requested.
    "I used to be a pilot," Tom explained.
    "I'm into homosexual necrophilia," said Tom in dead earnest.
  • Too Dumb to Fool:
    • Trolls in general. Vimes describes Detritus as this in Feet of Clay, almost word for word. In Making Money when Vimes sends troll guards to the bank, Moist comments that they're not too smart, but you can't talk them over to your side either.
    • Fred Colon, acting in his role as cell warden. He's stupid, but he's not an idiot. He keeps the keys in a tin box in the bottom drawer of his desk. He also ends up wandering into investigating the key to one of the mysteries in Thud. Due to this, Colon is one of the few people Lord Vetinari finds hard to deal with. Vetinari is so used to dealing with people who treat words as a form of warfare that virtually everything he says carries multiple connotations, implications, innuendo, traps, and suggestions. All of which reach escape velocity over Colon's head, making him nigh invulnerable to being played, tricked, warned, or helped.
  • Too Dumb to Live: To the degree that the Watch in Ankh-Morpork now consider entering the Mended Drum and calling yourself "Vincent the Invulnerable" a form of suicide. Needless to say, there are quite a few means of committing suicide in the city. Many of them involve typical Ankh-Morporkian stupidity and Berserk Buttons, or just entering the Shades.
  • Trademark Favourite Food:
    • Rincewind becomes obsessed with potatoes by the start of Interesting Times, after spending a long time marooned on a paradisical island where they were pretty much the only food he was unable to get.
    • Quoth the Raven likes eyeballs. A running joke in Hogfather is him mistaking other small round items for them.
    • Susan loves chocolates, except for nougat.
    • Archchancellor Ridcully always puts a lot of spice on his food, especially Wow-Wow Sauce, a condiment so potent as to be downright dangerous.
  • Training the Gift of Magic: This trope is at least strongly implied to be highly active in the series:
    • In the earliest books, wizards (and presumably witches) are said to be able to see "octarine", the eighth color of the spectrum, the "color of magic". This isn't mentioned much in later books, but it still seems in those that magic is some sort of innate gift.
    • It also seems that people with strong magical gifts, such as Eskarina Smith, can be dangerous to everyone around them if not properly trained. Even partly-trained but powerful casters can be dangerous to themselves; for example, "borrowing" an animal's mind can lead to a witch becoming lost in the animal's senses. Unseen University has a gymnasium lined with magic-proof materials where students are required to practice.
    • The one attempt we see by untrained characters to work significant magic, in Guards! Guards!, involves lengthy rituals and external sources of power. Trouble is, they can produce an effect but have no control over it.
  • Translation by Volume: In the Discworld GURPS sourcebook, this is a skill called "Shouting At Foreigners". It is an actual skill that can be used instead of a foreign language. Many people think that they can get by in any language by speaking loudly, slowly and clearly in their own, or by dredging up a few half-remembered words from old stories and books. On the Disc, this sometimes works.
  • Tribal Face Paint: The Nac Mac Feegle have elaborate clan tattoos, to the extent that the books sometimes seem contradictory as to whether they actually have blue skin or not.
  • True Beauty Is on the Inside: Most heroes are not physical exemplars.
    • A young Granny Weatherwax "might have been called handsome by a good-natured liar".
    • Vimes is described in Guards! Guards! as a "skinny, unshaven collection of bad habits marinated in alcohol".
  • True Sight:
    • Wizards and witches can see what's really there, on account of them having no Weirdness Censor.
    • Children seem to have this. Even when Death makes himself known, most adults won't even notice that he's a skeleton, because everybody knows that skeletons can't walk around and talk. Children don't know that, though, and they see Death as he really looks. Not that it bothers them at all. One of the few times he's openly seen by adults is during the performance of a play featuring the character of Death — since they are expecting to see "Death", they see Death — and he promptly gets stage fright, as he's unused to being seen by so many people at once.
  • Twilight of the Old West: A major part of the Troll Bridge short exams the world having passed Conan by after he had killed so many monsters and conquered so many kingdoms and robbed so many temples. Now everyone is claiming the wastelands as farms and settling down into trades Pratcchet even sites this trope explicitly in an interview for the animated adaption.
  • T-Word Euphemism:
    • The reformed vampires' refrain of "the B-vord".
    • Quoth the Raven's refusal to use the "N-word"note .
    • Don't forget to NEVER, EVER use the M-word near the Librarian of the Unseen University.

    Tropes U to Z 
  • Unequal Rites:
    • Witches and Wizards are not to be confused. Witches are wise women who mostly work in rural areas (we do meet one urban witch), handling medicine, births, and funerals, all splashed with a bit of ritual for psychology's sake; they tend to form covens of three. Wizards are a parody of real world university academia, and they're especially similar to your average nuclear physics department given how dangerous magic is treated in the books. Equal Rites explores the contrast between them, and the topic gets revisited in The Shepherd's Crown.
    • An early book mentions magicians, conjurors, and thaumaturgists; to extend the "wizards=academics" metaphor, they're basically the guys who got lower-level degrees. Conjurers have been compared to special effects guys- they find more work than wizards, not because they know more but because they make it more entertaining. Thaumaturgists are compared to surly lab assistants.
    • Granny Weatherwax mentions warlocks in passing, describing them as men who try to be witches and usually wind up just looking damn silly.
    • Fairy Godmothers, as seen in Witches Abroad, are treated as a subset of witch who just happen to use "wizardy" tools, like the star-tipped wand (the distinction is kind of blurred; Granny Weatherwax played a witchy godmother in Carpe Jugulum, which starts as a parody of Sleeping Beauty)
  • Unreliable Canon: Early novels often contained contradictory elements, because Pratchett was more concerned with the quality of the story than with consistency. Later, he adopted a more consistent canon, but those early stories have still have a hard time fitting with it.
    • This gets lampshaded and explained in-universe in Thief of Time as a result of the Time Monks' attempts to fix time after it broke.
  • Unresolved Sexual Tension: If you're a major character with a potential love interest in a Discworld novel this is pretty much the only alternative to becoming an Official Couple after your first book. Usually involves the Wizards and/or the older Witches and usually Played for Laughs. Prominent examples include Nanny Ogg/Casanunda and Senior Wrangler/Mrs Whitlow. Granny Weatherwax/Mustrum Ridcully probably qualify under Belligerent Sexual Tension, with a slightly more serious tone invoking What Could Have Been.
  • The Unwitting Comedian: Bouncy Normo, the funniest clown who ever lived. In reality, the man was The Bore and yet everything he did made people laugh. His story heads straight into Crosses the Line Twice territory when the narrator says that the despair of people laughing at him even as he begged them to stop eventually drew him to commit suicide. His hanging corpse was somehow considered an avant-garde comedy act by those who found him. It so funny in fact, that it stayed on the noose for weeks afterward.
  • Vancian Magic: Early books seemed to suggest that wizarding magic worked off a variant, where spells were in a sense living creatures that, when learned, took up residence in the wizard's brain, and were released again on casting. Later books dropped any mentions of the idea, although it was never actually rendered non-canon either.
  • Virtual Sidekick: Canonically, the Magitek A.I. called HEX performs this task for Wizards doing field trips and front-line work on the bizarre and exotic counter-Disc known as Roundworld, or Earth. HEX also acts as helpful guide and support to Wizards such as Ponder Stibbons, in their everyday work on the Disc.
  • Vow of Celibacy:
    • Wizards of Unseen University are generally expected to stay celibate. The common/official explanation is that it interferes with their magic, but as per the book Sourcery, it's more likely to be a measure to prevent wizards from having descendants, because the eighth son of a wizard (himself an eighth son of an eighth son) is a dangerous super-wizard, and it's considered better to prevent wizards from having kids at all than to risk it. In later Discworld novels the UU vow of celibacy seems to have shifted in the same way as Oxford and Cambridge Universities (see Real Life), in that wizards can have relations with women, but can't get married.
    • Esmerelda Weatherwax never had any (non-witchcraft) relations with men after Mustrum Ridcully left for Unseen University, which becomes a plot point when a unicorn shows up. In her case it wasn't really a vow, since she found it easier being the scary witch.
  • Wants Versus Needs: The heart of Granny Weatherwax's Good is Not Nice attitude is based around knowign the difference between what people want and what they actually need — being a witch is less about magic than about knowing the people in her territory and doing what needs to be done for them, whatever their feelings on the matter. In "The Sea and Little Fishes", Nanny Ogg reflects on how isolating this can be:
    Like old Pollirt the other day, when he fell off his horse. What he wanted was a painkiller. What he needed was the few seconds of agony as Granny popped the joint back into place. The trouble was, people remembered the pain.
  • Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma:
    • The witches don't really let spelling apply to them.
    • Carrot's approach to punctuation is basically a pin the tail on the donkey game. The trope name actually comes from Vimes' description of Carrot's reports.
    • The head of the Greengrocers' Guild makes Carrot look like a grammatical genius.
  • Warrior vs. Sorcerer: One paragraph describes why wizards and warriors don't get along. It essentially boils down to each side calling the other gay (warriors accuse wizards of wearing long robes and can't perform magic when a woman's around, wizards retort that warriors sure do spend a lot of time in gyms surrounded by muscular men wearing very little leather clothing).
  • Waterfall into the Abyss: The ocean falls off all sides of the Disc, but "arrangements are made" (it's probably quantum). There are even people who take advantage of this and have put a net around the edge (the "circumfence") to catch floating items for salvage.
  • Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Lord Vetinari, a product of the Assassins' Guild's school where every graduate is expected to demonstrate lethal proficiency in at least one weapon, uses language to deadly effect.
    "Do not let me detain you."
    "No great rush!"
  • The Weird Sisters: The "coven" of the Lancre Witches (first introduced in Wyrd Sisters), formed by Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick (from Maskerade onwards replaced by Agnes Nitt).
  • Weirdness Censor: It's pretty ironclad, as when anything that doesn't fit into what people consider "normal" (such as Death walking among them) is actively ignored. The complete lack of a Weirdness Censor is one of the abilities of wizards and witches; in the Tiffany Aching books, it's called First Sight. Young children also often lack a weirdness censor, because they don't yet have any real expectations as to what the universe is like; in Reaper Man, a child is the only person who recognizes that the recently-retired Death (going under the name "Bill Door") is not just a tall, skinny guy, but rather (as she puts it) "a skellington."
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Has its own page.
  • Wiki Walk: Leonard of Quirm, the wizards of the university, and some many other characters are fond of these.
  • Witch Classic: The pointy hats are very important, since a lot of being a witch is based on everyone else seeing you as a witch. The black clothes seem to be mostly because witches are practical and black is hard-wearing. Nanny Ogg and more recently Granny Weatherwax have cats. Broomsticks are generally only used by witches, even though they're made by dwarfs and can be flown by anyone, even without magical talent. One difference from the standard version is that although witches are Always Female, and Discworld magic is hereditary, witchcraft isn't passed down from mother to daughter here, it being considered that young witches should learn from another witch with a different way of doing things to prevent a family's magical style from coiling in on itself.
  • Wizard Classic: Most of the wizards in the series conform to this image, no doubt out of professional pride. Many avert it in some respects, however, such as in their method of Klingon Promotion or the fact that they intentionally avoid doing more magic than they have to. Rincewind is a classic wizard despite being hopelessly incompetent when it comes to spells.
  • 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. Witches are also pretty long-lasting. That said, they still age at the same rate. This is explicitly why so many of them are old men and women: they are old for most of their lives.
  • Wizard Workshop: The novels can't have a scene in a magic-user's residence without poking fun at this trope. Most common are jokes about how they all order identical décor out of a kit: pre-dribbled candles, dusty skulls (with optional raven on top), mysterious alchemical glass apparati (usually filled with green-dyed water and soap), and the sorcerer's equivalent of the Jacob's ladder, i.e. a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling.
  • Woman Were-Woes:
    • Angua's narration often mentions her transformation in the broader context of her being the only woman in the Watch (at least until female dwarfs start openly dressing female) and likening it to Menstrual Menace, but also mentions problems like the nagging feeling she should be wearing three bras.
    • Sally the vampire also mentions turning into a cloud of bats is more of a problem for her than for a man since she ends up naked afterwards.
  • 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.
  • Woolseyism: In many, if not most non-English European language, "Death" is a gendered word, and of feminine gender too in Latin and Slavic languages. The French translations systematically include a footnote the first time grammar causes Death to be referred to as male, and as the series progresses, they get increasingly cheeky. The one in Small Gods, for example, has the translator and editor encouraging "readers whose sensibilities are so offended"... to outright read all twelve prior Discworld books.
  • World of Badass: If you intend to mess with someone here, make sure they're not witches, wizards, watchmen, werewolves, dwarfs, trolls, Mrs. Cake, demons, gods, gnomes, Mrs. Cake, vampires, pictsies, heroes, assassins, the Luggage, Mrs. Cake or, last but not least, the Librarian. It's a wonder that anyone else is left in the place.
    • In fact, attempting to mess with Death is probably your safest bet on this world. The most he'll likely do is act confused/amused at your antics and walk away. (Note that this covers messing with Death himself. Mess with anything he cares about, and regret it.)
    • If you think that you can take down a watchman, make sure they're not Vimes, Carrot, Angua, Detritus, or Dorfl. note 
    • Reckon you can mess with a nine-year-old? Don't mess with Tiffany.
  • World of Pun:
    • Pratchett likes to include at least one silly pune [sic], or play on words, per book.
    • The name of the countries Djelibeybi and Hersheba. Terry Pratchett's realization that American audiences weren't getting the Djelibeybi pun inspired the creation of nearby Hersheba, which most audiences in general aren't getting. (If you've heard of the candy, the Djelibeybi pun is criminally easy to get, due to it being mentally pronounced the same way, and lampshaded when we're told Djelibeybi literally means "Child of the Djel." Hersheba is not as easy — this is due to variation in pronunciation (the most obvious pronunciation rhymes with Bethsheba), the fact that it doesn't have a lampshade, and it doesn't have a book focused on it. Once you remember that some British accents drop the r sound in words ending in 'ar', though....note 
    • The Ramtop Mountains are named after RAMTOP, the ZX Spectrum system variable which points to the top of user memory.
    • Bhrian Bloodaxe, the first dwarf according to Discworld legend, is named after ZX Spectrum game Brian Bloodaxe.
  • You Can't Kill What's Already Dead:
    • Zombies are much more resilient and stronger than humans, with watchzombie Reg Shoe taking a crossbow bolt through the chest and only complaining of the puncture holes in his armor. They are, however, very vulnerable to fire.
    • Werewolves are apparently considered undead by the narration, with one surviving a fatal bullet wound as the bullet wasn't silver.
    • Vampires can be killed/turned to dust temporarily, but almost always come back when exposed to drops of blood. A sword through the chest has no effect on them, and they can survive being beheaded (and then direct you how to reattach their head). It is, however, pointed out that scattering their dust or throwing their remains off the edge of the Disc would leave them begging for the end.

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Death saves the Match Girl

During his substitution for the Hogfather, Death runs into the Little Match Girl on the verge of death on the streets. Albert tries to spin her death in a positive light, as a reminder to be thankful for what you have. However, Death is disgusted by this notion and uses his current status as the Hogfather to give life rather than take it, reviving the Match Girl with the gift of a future, before handing her over to some guards so she may have some food and care.

Example of:
Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!

Terry Pratchett...

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top

Death saves the Match Girl

During his substitution for the Hogfather, Death runs into the Little Match Girl on the verge of death on the streets. Albert tries to spin her death in a positive light, as a reminder to be thankful for what you have. However, Death is disgusted by this notion and uses his current status as the Hogfather to give life rather than take it, reviving the Match Girl with the gift of a future, before handing her over to some guards so she may have some food and care.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (29 votes)

Example of:

Main / ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight

Media sources:

Report

Death saves the...

Terry Pratchett...