50 Fun Facts About Discworld

Which Discworld hero, still fighting in his nineties, wears dentures made from a troll's diamond teeth?

Cohen the Barbarian. An echo of Conan grown very old, he leads the Silver Horde, a band of equally ancient heroes who have lasted this long by being extremely good at not dying.

On the backs of which four giant animals does the Disc rest?

Elephants. Legend on the Disc says there was once a fifth, which slipped off and crashed back onto the world, leaving the buried deposits of fat that are mined in Überwald.

What is the name of the giant turtle that carries the Discworld through space?

Great A'Tuin. Nobody on the Disc knows whether the turtle is male or female, so in the first novel the people of Krull build a capsule to drop over the Rim and take a look.

Which Discworld novel came last?

The Shepherd's Crown, the 41st, came out months after Pratchett died in 2015. He had asked that anything left unfinished be destroyed, so in 2017 his hard drive was crushed by a steamroller.

What was the title of the first Discworld novel, published in 1983?

The Colour of Magic. Pratchett called it an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns, and it ends on a literal cliffhanger, with its hero going over the edge of the world.

Which Discworld novel sends up The Phantom of the Opera, with a ghost haunting a city opera house?

Maskerade. Its heroine, Agnes Nitt, has the best voice in the company but is kept in the chorus, singing the leading role from the shadows while a prettier soprano takes the bows.

What is the biggest city on the Disc, its corrupt mercantile capital?

Ankh-Morpork runs on the principle of One Man, One Vote: the Patrician is the Man, and he has the Vote.

Which cowardly, incompetent wizard was the first Discworld protagonist?

Rincewind. He was born, the books say, with a wizard's spirit and the body of a long-distance sprinter, which is why so many people have tried to kill him and he is still running.

Twoflower, the Disc's first tourist, is an insurance clerk from where?

Agatean Empire. Twoflower sells a local innkeeper a fire insurance policy, a new idea in those parts, and the man promptly burns his tavern down for the money, taking much of the city with it.

The Luggage is made from which magical material?

Sapient pearwood grows only where old magic has soaked the ground, which leaves it proof against spells; the chest made from it follows its owner anywhere on hundreds of little legs.

Which Discworld street trader is nicknamed for swearing that, at his prices, he is 'cutting me own throat'?

Dibbler. His stock in trade is the sausage in a bun, made of things best not asked about, and whenever one of his get-rich-quick schemes collapses he goes back to selling them from a tray.

What is the name of Death's pale horse?

Binky. Death first tried a skeletal steed, but kept having to stop and wire bits back on, and then a fiery one that set its own bedding alight, so he settled for a living white horse.

Death turns up in all but two Discworld novels, always speaking in which style of lettering?

Small capitals, without quotation marks: a skeleton has no vocal cords, so his words are said to arrive in the head without troubling the ears. Only The Wee Free Men and Snuff do without him.

Which 1987 novel was the first to focus on Death, who takes on a human apprentice?

Mort. He lasts only briefly as Death's apprentice: he falls in love with his master's adopted daughter, marries her, and ends the book as a duke.

What is the name of Death's granddaughter, a key character in Soul Music and Hogfather?

Susan Sto Helit. Death only adopted her mother, yet Susan inherited some of his powers anyway: she can walk through walls and step outside time, though she earns her living as a governess.

The title of Reaper Man references which film?

Repo Man, Alex Cox's 1984 cult film. In the novel the Auditors retire Death for having grown a personality, and he takes work as a farm hand under the name Bill Door.

In Hogfather, the Auditors hire an Assassin named what to eliminate the Hogfather?

Mr Teatime, who insists it is pronounced Teh-ah-tim-eh, breaks into the Tooth Fairy's realm and uses the stolen teeth to make the Disc's children stop believing in the Hogfather.

The Discworld's leading witches live in which mountain kingdom?

Lancre. The kingdom is so tiny that one man, Shawn Ogg, is its army, its palace guard, its herald and its postman, yet it counts witches among its exports.

What do Discworld witches call the knack they prefer to magic?

Headology rests on the principle that what people believe is what is real, so a witch can cure a patient, or win a village's respect, without using any magic at all.

Nanny Ogg's murderous cat is called what?

Greebo. Nanny Ogg still sees a sweet kitten in the scarred, evil-smelling tom that every animal in the forest fears, a cat said to have once chased a bear up a tree.

Wyrd Sisters, the 1988 witches novel, mainly parodies which playwright?

Shakespeare. The plot stitches Macbeth to Hamlet: three witches meddle after a duke murders his king, and the truth comes out when a troupe of actors stages the crime in front of the killer.

Equal Rites, the third Discworld novel, introduced which character?

Granny Weatherwax. She takes charge of Esk, a girl handed a staff of power at birth by a dying wizard who never checked the baby's sex, and escorts her to the men-only Unseen University.

Sam Vimes first appears, in the eighth Discworld novel, as captain of which force?

The Night Watch. With the guilds left to police their own crimes, it has withered to three men nobody expects to arrest anyone, until an eager recruit arrives who takes the law at its word.

Carrot Ironfoundersson is a human raised by which people?

Dwarfs. Carrot is a foundling raised in a dwarf mine who grew to six foot six, and on his first day as a watchman he arrests the head of the perfectly legal Thieves' Guild.

What creature terrorises the city in Discworld's first City Watch novel?

A dragon. The plotters mean their puppet to slay it and take the throne, but the beast comes back, makes itself king instead and demands gold and sacrifices.

Which Watch member is a werewolf?

Angua. She was hired in a drive to bring the city's minorities into the Watch, in the same intake as a troll and a dwarf, and her wolf's nose soon made her its best tracker.

Vimes's 'boots theory' of socioeconomic unfairness appears in which 1993 novel?

Men at Arms. Vimes reasons that a rich man's fifty-dollar boots last for years while a poor man's ten-dollar pairs keep wearing out and cost him more; in 2022 a campaigner named a food-price index after the idea.

What noble title does Sam Vimes eventually hold?

Duke of Ankh. Vimes learned his trade as a street copper, then married Lady Sybil Ramkin, the richest woman in the city, and was pushed up the ranks until he found himself a duke.

In the 2002 time-travel novel, Vimes is sent back and must assume whose identity?

John Keel. The real Keel is murdered on the day he arrives by the killer who fell through time with Vimes, so Vimes has to take his place and teach his own younger self how to be a copper.

What is the first name of Lord Vetinari, the Patrician?

Havelock. Vetinari trained at the Assassins' Guild and loathes mimes, whom he is said to hang upside down in a scorpion pit facing a sign that reads 'Learn the Words'.

The Librarian of Unseen University was magically turned into what?

An orangutan. A burst of stray magic transformed him in the second novel, and he has fought off every attempt to change him back; the one thing he will not stand for is being called a monkey.

Who is the bombastic Archchancellor of Unseen University in the later novels?

Mustrum Ridcully. After almost forty years away in the country the wizards took him for a pushover; they got a bellowing sportsman who shoots anything that flies and who put an end to promotion by assassination.

What is Hex in the Discworld novels?

A magical computer. Hex began as a student project in which ants running through glass tubes did the sums, and it has been adding parts to itself ever since, including a real mouse and an 'Anthill Inside' sticker.

Moist von Lipwig, a con man reprieved from the gallows, makes his first appearance in which novel?

Going Postal. Moist is hanged to within half an inch of his life under a false name, wakes in the Patrician's office and is offered a choice: the derelict Post Office, or a door with a fatal drop behind it.

In the Moist von Lipwig novels, the visual telegraph towers are known as what?

Clacks. In the novels the operators keep a dead man's name travelling the line for ever under the code GNU; when Pratchett died in 2015, fans hid 'GNU Terry Pratchett' in the headers of their websites.

Pratchett's 40th Discworld novel brings which invention to the Disc?

Locomotives. In Raising Steam a self-taught young engineer, Dick Simnel, builds Iron Girder, the Disc's first steam train, and Moist von Lipwig is put to work on the railway that follows.

Small Gods tells the origin of which god and his prophet Brutha?

Om. Gods on the Disc live on belief, and the Great God comes back to find himself stuck in the body of a tortoise because, in all his vast church, only the novice Brutha still truly believes in him.

Djelibeybi is the Disc's counterpart to which ancient civilisation?

Egypt. Djelibeybi, a pun on jelly baby, is a kingdom two miles wide along the river Djel, and in the novel Pyramids its newest and biggest tomb twists the whole country out of step with space and time.

Which kitchen utensil does Tiffany Aching swing at monsters?

Frying pan. Using her little brother as bait, Tiffany lures the river monster Jenny Greenteeth out and clouts it, and later she takes a frying pan to the Queen of the Elves as well.

The Feegles, Tiffany Aching's tiny blue guardians, speak in which dialect?

Scots. Pratchett described their speech as a mixture of Gaelic, Old Scots, Glaswegian and gibberish, yet insisted the Feegles are not Scottish, since there is no Scotland on the Disc.

Which Discworld book won the 2001 Carnegie Medal?

The Amazing Maurice, in full The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, is a dark twist on the Pied Piper written for children; after years of bestsellers it brought Pratchett his first major literary prize.

With whom did Pratchett co-write the 1990 novel Good Omens?

Neil Gaiman. The pair plotted the book in long daily phone calls and posted floppy disks back and forth, and by the end neither was sure who had written what.

Who illustrated the Discworld covers until his death in 2001?

Josh Kirby. Born Ronald Kirby, he owed the name to art school in Liverpool, where his old-master-style portraits put classmates in mind of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the nickname stuck for life.

Pratchett was diagnosed with which condition in 2007?

Early-onset Alzheimer's, in a rare form that attacks the back of the brain. Pratchett called it an 'embuggerance', gave a million dollars to research and made BBC films about living with it.

Knighted in 2009, Pratchett dug up iron ore and had it forged into what?

Sword. He smelted the ore in a kiln he built himself and threw in pieces of meteorite, 'thunderbolt iron', for magic, on the grounds that a knight ought to have a sword.

Who voiced Death in the Cosgrove Hall animated Discworld adaptations of the 1990s?

Christopher Lee voiced Death in both cartoons, Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music, and was called back to the part for a live-action Sky adaptation in 2008.

The Watch, the 2021 TV series loosely based on the City Watch, premiered on which channel?

BBC America. The series was sold as a 'punk rock' take on the books, and it strayed so far that Rhianna Pratchett said it shared 'no DNA with my father's Watch'.

In 2016 fans petitioned to name element 117 after which colour, the Disc's eighth?

Octarine, which on the Disc only those sensitive to magic can see. Fans judged element 117 the best fit among the four newly recognised elements, but the chemists named it tennessine.

Pratchett's first novel, published in 1971, was titled what?

The Carpet People. Pratchett wrote this tale of tiny peoples living among the hairs of a carpet when he was 17, and two decades later, as a famous author, he heavily revised it and published it again.

Before Discworld success, Pratchett was press officer for which organisation?

Central Electricity Generating Board. The future fantasy author spoke for a region with several nuclear power stations, and said he would write a book about the job if he thought anyone would believe it.