Author: Ben

#Pratchat91 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 91, “We Can Reference It For You Wholesale”, discussing the various editions of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs’ The Discworld Companion, but especially 2021’s The Ultimate Discworld Companion.

Iconographic Evidence

The Discworld Companion(s)
The four editions of Companion in Ben’s library: the 1997 Discworld Companion (Updated!), Turtle Recall, The Ultimate Discworld Companion, and out of its slipcase, the Dunmanifestin “Expanded Edition” of The Ultimate Discworld Companion. The cover art is by, in order, Josh Kirby, Marc Simonetti, Paul Kidby, and Paul Kidby.

Stephen Briggs was kind enough to offer to answer any questions folks had, so we asked if he’d share an image of the original index cards. And he did! See the tweets below. He also mentioned that the cards are seen in the 2017 biographical documentary, Terry Pratchett: Back in Black.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title references both the Ankh-Morpork national anthem, “We Can Rule It For You Wholesale” (see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”, for more on the anthem), and also Philip K Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – adapted for the screen (twice!) as Total Recall. (See #Pratchat56, “do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);”, for more on Philip K Dick.)
  • You can find the Annotated Pratchett File (affectionately known as the APF), the FAQ, the Pratchett Quote File and many more newsgroup-era fan resources at the L-Space Web.
  • Like other newsgroups at the time, alt.tv.red-dwarf had not just one FAQ, but a whole set of documents covering different topics. You can find them scattered about the web, but none of them seem to have been updated after the year 2000, so they’re all very out of date.
  • The Terry Pratchett and Discworld Wiki is also hosted by the L-Space web, and is often referred to as “the L-Space wiki” as shorthand (and to differentiate it from the Discworld wiki at Fandom.com). You can find it at wiki.lspace.org – and please join up and help improve it if you want! There are only a few active members at the moment (and a whole lot of spambots out there…)
  • Wikipedia articles don’t all lead to “Psychology” – they lead to “Philosophy”! This phenomenon, known as “Getting to Philosophy”, is that successively clicking on the first wiki-link of a Wikipedia article leads most of the time to the article on Philosophy. This has been well-demonstrated by analysis of Wikipedia data, and Wikipedia itself has an article about it (though not in the main encyclopaedia space).
  • Ben is correct about both things he thought were mentioned in the books:
    • The Glingleglingleglingle Fairy appears to Ridcully in the bath near the end of Hogfather.
    • The idea that Anoia might do stuck zips is, indeed, in Wintersmith; she mentions it when introducing herself to Tiffany in Chapter 7.
  • Ben’s information about editions of the Companion is secondhand for those not pictured above, and some of it may not be correct. For instance, we’ve heard from listener Steve that the trade paperback edition of The New Discworld Companion is not updated to include The Wee Free Men. (It’s possible the regular paperback edition was, but we don’t know yet.) This goes to show the importance of checking primary sources where possible, which is why Ben has ordered the various editions! But here’s a quick list of the major revisions mentioned:
    • The Discworld Companion, first published in 1994; at least two editions
    • The Discworld Companion: Updated, first published in 1997; probably just one edition?
    • The New Discworld Companion, first published in 2002; at least three editions
    • Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion…So Far, first published in 2012; just two editions
    • The Ultimate Discworld Companion, first published in 2021; just one edition
    • The Ultimate Discworld Companion: Expanded Edition (aka “The Dunmanifestin Edition”), first published in 2022
  • The mystery is solved! The only male member of the Seamstresses Guild, Mr Harris of the Blue Cat Club, appears in just one place in the novels – the third-last footnote in Jingo. Mr Harris – likely a reference to the author of My Life and Loves, Frank Harris – is a member of the Guild’s committee. The club is also given a brief write-up in the “Nightlife and Clubland” section of The Compleat Ankh-Morpork. Thanks to Old Dickens of the afore-mentioned L-Space Wiki.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat90 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 90, “Mind the Ginnungagap”, discussing the 40th Discworld novel, 2013’s Raising Steam, with returning guest Craig Hildebrand-Burke.

Iconographic Evidence

The cover of the first edition US hardcover, the first of Pratchett’s books to be published by Doubleday in the US. The cover art is by Justin Gerard, his only cover for a Discworld novel, though he did do the US covers for The Science of Discworld books, The Folklore of Discworld, A Blink of the Screen and A Slip of the Keyboard.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title makes the obvious gag that Pratchett himself didn’t, combining ginnungagap – the primordial “yawning void” of Norse (and Discworld dwarfish) mythology, from which the world (or one of them, at least) was created – and “mind the gap”, the famous advice on posters and announcements in the London Underground, warning passengers of the gap between the train and the platform.
  • As mentioned, Craig was previously a guest on one of our last pre-pandemic episodes: #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”, discussing Jingo.
  • “Gunzel” is uniquely Australian slang for a train or tram spotter – or by analogy, anyone with a specific nerdy interest (though that usage is uncommon). While it has an uncertain etymology, the term is at least several decades old; one account traces it specifically back to employees of the Sydney Tramway Museum in the 1960s, who supposedly picked it up from The Maltese Falcon (as they enjoyed using exaggerated American slang from old films and magazines). Originally used as a insult akin to British terms like “gricer” and “anorak”.
  • Melbourne’s City Loop is a central underground railway system passing in a circle through five stations in Melbourne’s central business district (CBD). Until 2025, all major train lines in Melbourne entered the loop on one of four tracks, passing through all of these stations before exiting again. In order to relieve congestion – there are eleven different train lines, but only four tracks in the loop – a new Metro Tunnel project was commenced in 2015 to dig a new tunnel across the CBD, linking the southeast directly to the northwest and creating five new underground stations (some of which are connected directly to the existing ones) in Melbourne and its inner suburbs. Those stations and the new tunnel opened in November 2025, and eventually some of the train lines will stop running around the loop and only run through the tunnel. (While not a true gunzel, Ben is very keen on public transport, so unlike Liz he’s very much looking forward to travelling on the new train route and seeing the new stations.)
  • Rob Wilkins gives an account of the writing of Raising Steam in the final chapter of the official Pratchett biography, A Life with Footnotes. He described the process as quite different from the usual, with Pratchett producing many, many scenes, but never getting to the stage of finding the “unifying, crystallising vision that would have turned these scenes into a novel”. He credits Pratchett’s UK editor, Philippa Dickson, with finding the pattern and the gaps in those scenes, and giving Wilkins advice on where to guide Pratchett in order to turn them into a book. Notably not involved was Pratchett’s previous and just as talented and beloved US editor, Jennifer Brehl, as he had only recently switched US publishers from HarperCollins to Knopf Doubleday. (This explains the new cover artist, as seen on Ben’s edition.)
  • Train-based fantasy, sci-fi and other fiction that we mention include:
    • Perdido Street Station and its sequels The Scar and The Iron Council, weird fiction novels by China Miéville which combine elements of fantasy and steampunk. The Iron Council features trains most prominently of the three.
    • Iron Dragon, perhaps the first “crayon rails” style train board game set in a fantasy world.
    • Westworld, the television series (based on the 1973 film) about fantasy theme parks staffed by “Hosts”, artificially intelligent robots indistinguishable from humans. The titular “Westworld”, a wild west town, was serviced by a replica steam train, which later plays an important part in the plot.
    • Points and Lines, aka Tokyo Express in the newer 2022 English translation, a 1958 Japanese crime novel by Seichō Matsumoto involving trains and timetables.
    • The Dark Tower series of novels, specifically The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass, by Stephen King. These books feature Blaine, an insane artificial intelligence which controls a monorail train. The children’s book which references Blaine is Charlie the Choo-Choo.
    • Deadlands is a roleplaying game originally designed by Shane Lacy Hensley. The supernatural ore that powers some of its steampunk technology is called “ghost rock”. The current version is a setting for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game, rather than a game in its own right. Note that like many “weird west” games and stories of the twentieth century, the original 1990s edition contained plenty of appropriation (and misrepresenation) of the cultures of Native and Black Americans; we’re not sure what the later versions are like.
    • Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath, a pair of related tabletop roleplaying games designed by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor. The class Ben mentions is the “Vermissian Knight”, though Ben got their ability twisted a bit; one of their “zenith abilities” (that are generally a character’s final act) turns them into a living train, who steams off into the Heart (the weird, living dungeon beneath the city of Spire, from which the abandoned Vermissian train system drew its power). The remaining members of their party get a special “Deus Ex Machina” abiltity that they can cash in once to have the train-thing return, smashing into an enemy who is defeating them and dealing massive damage before going on their way again.
    • The Peter Grant novels, particularly Whispers Underground, by Ben Aaronovitch. Aaronovitch is a big Pratchett fan, and references the Discworld in most of his novels; he also coincidientally reviewed Raising Steam for The Guardian when it was first published.
    • Snowpiercer, a film and subsequent television series, both based on the French graphic novel by Jacques Lob.
    • Abiotic Factor, a survival videogame by New Zealand developers Deep Field Games. The Train, also known as “the Steam Engine” or IS-0138 (a designation usually given to creatures or objects, rather than worlds), is noted as “highly dangerous” with the note “IT MUST NEVER STOP”.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat89 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 89, “An Awfully Teeny Weeny Adventure”, discussing the 1995 computer game Discworld, with guest Jody Macgregor.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add a few choice screenshots here! Watch this space.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is obviously a reference to one of the companies who made Discworld, Teeny Weeny Games, and the fact that it’s a graphic adventure game. But it’s also a riff on “an awfully big adventure”, which is how Peter Pan describes death in the original play by J M Barrie. An Awfully Big Adventure is also the title of a film – coincidentally released in 1995, the same year as Discworld – about a teenage girl drawn into the drama and trauma behind the scenes of a post-war production of Peter Pan. It was directed by Mike Newell, and starred Georgina Cates, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. (Note that the film comes with a few content warnings.)
  • You can read a PDF of the 1993 interview with Terry from PC Gamer #1 via the PC Gamer website. It was originally made available for ‘A tribute to Terry Pratchett’, an article by Christopher Livingston published on 13 March 2015, soon after his death.
  • We mention two articles which discuss who holds the rights to the game:
  • Unsurprisingly we mention a lot of videogames in this episode, especially adventure games. Here’s a quick list of the adventure games; we’ll add more games, and some details, soon.
    • The Secret of Monkey Island (LucasArts 1990)
    • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (LucasArts 1991)
    • Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (Sierra On-Line 1991) – Ben was wrong about the prequel that was skipped; he’s confusing the time travel in this game (in which space janitor Roger Wilco visits several sequel games that don’t yet exist) with the missing fourth game in Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry series. (Similar “Search for the Sequel” jokes have been proposed for films, but none filmed as far as we can find.)
    • Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts 1993)
    • Sam & Max Hit the Road (LucasArts 1993)
    • Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds (Humongous Entertainment 1994) – designed by Ron Gilbert, who also made The Secret of Monkey Island and most of the other adventure games mentioned by Ben this episode!
    • Full Throttle (LucasArts 1995)
    • The Curse of Monkey Island (LucasArts 1997)
    • Grim Fandango (LucasArts 1998)
    • Duck Quest? (Waffle Friday Studios 2013)
    • The Cave (Doublefine Productions 2013)
    • Thimbleweed Park (Terrible Toybox 2017)
    • Return to Monkey Island (Terrible Toybox 2022)

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat88 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 88, “They’re All Good Dragons, Bront”, discussing Paul Kidby’s 2024 art book, Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with guest Brendan Barnett.

Iconographic Evidence

We can’t show you photos of the book, but you can find a lot of the art on Paul Kidby’s official website.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to a famous tweet from the social media account WeRateDogs. This account shared photos of dogs submitted by their owners on Twitter, and rated them with outrageously positive comments, giving all of them scores of at least 10 out of 10. In 2016, another Twitter user named Brant complained about their rating system. WeRateDogs asked “Bront” (a deliberate misspelling of his name) why he was so mad, and he replied that “you give every dog 11s and 12s, it doesn’t make any sense”. Their now famous reply: “They’re good dogs Bront”. (We based our title on the misquote “They’re all good dogs, Bront”.) WeRateDogs is still going, and still a delight; you can find their social links at weratedogs.com.
  • The book Brendan describes from his youth with Death keeping bees is almost certainly the original large-format edition of Eric, lavishly illustrated by Josh Kirby. See #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”.
  • The desktop calendar Brendan mentions might have been a Discworld Day-to-Day Calendar, available in 1999 and/or 2000. It’s one of those types with a plastic stand holding a pad of small square sheets, one for each day of the year. Ben thinks he might also have had one of these back then.
  • George Rex is an Adelaide-based illustrator and cartoonist, and friend of the podcast. She appeared as a guest in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies” and #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • For the record, the book does a great job of crediting all the art by other artists or from other publishers in an appendix. Ben just wishes the Kidby pieces were given years and sources as well!
  • Colin Morgan is an Irish actor most famous for playing the titular young wizard in the BBC fantasy adventure TV series Merlin from 2008 to 2012. His other credits include the sci-fi series Humans, Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast, and the podcast drama Passenger List. He was the narrator for the first full sub-series of new Discworld audiobooks from Penguin, the Wizards books. That includes The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Sourcery, Eric, Interesting Times, The Last Continent, and Unseen Academicals. (The Last Hero is not published by Penguin, and did not get an audiobook.)
  • Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch is a 2023 book written by Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent, compiling Tiffany’s in-character thoughts on witchcraft with commentary by many of her mentors (amongst other characters). It’s published in a very similar format to Designing Discworld, and is also lavishly illustrated by Paul Kidby. We originally planned to discuss both this book and Tiffany Aching’s Guide in the same episode as this one, but we’ve got other plans for it now – watch out for a discussion of it next year. We interviewed Rhianna and Gabrielle when it came out in #Pratchat74, “Hogswitch”.
  • On closer inspection, Ben thinks the “handwritten” footnotes might be done using a handwriting font rather than actually being written by Paul. He’s not sure, but either way, it’s a fun visual choice!
  • The painting Ben describes is actually The Discworld Massive Massif, a larger and much expanded version of Kidby’s earlier Discworld Massif. The new was painted to commemorate Paul’s thirty years of illustrating Discworld in 2023. It features 140 characters, which we assume isn’t a deliberate reference to the old days of Twitter. You can buy one of a limited collector’s edition print of it from Paul Kidby’s website, or get it in jigsaw puzzle form from the Discworld Emporium.
  • There’ll be more notes on art and artists to come, but for now, here’s a list of UK first edition cover artists of Terry Pratchett’s major works. (The American covers are a whole other thing.)
    • Terry did his own covers for his first two novels, The Carpet People and The Dark Side of the Sun (#Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”). His third, Strata (#Pratchat68, “Discus Ex Machina”), had a piece by Tim White which bears little connection to the novel itself.
    • The original cover for The Colour of Magic (#Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”) was by Alan Smith.
    • Josh Kirby was brought in when the Discworld novels moved to Gollancz and Corgi, and he did them all – as well as various spin-offs – until his death in 2001, his last being Thief of Time (#Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”). Kirby also did the original covers for Truckers (#Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”), Diggers (#Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy”) and Wings (#Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath my Wings”), plus new covers for Terry’s older novels when they were re-published by Corgi. He also did art for most German editions of Pratchett’s other books, including anthologies of short stories in which work by Pratchett appeared.
    • Cartoonist Gray Joliffe collaborated with Pratchett on The Unadulterated Cat (#Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”), including the original cover art. (The most recent edition was The Unadulterated Maurice, which replaced the cover and all interior illustrations with images of Maurice from The Amazing Maurice film.)
    • The original cover for Good Omens (#Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It, But We Feel Nice and Accurate”) was designed by Chris Moore, though the most famous early cover was for the paperback edition, which features art by Graham Ward.
    • The Johnny Maxwell books didn’t originally have unified cover designs, with each one done by a different artist: David Scutt for Only You Can Save Mankind (#Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”), John Avon for Johnny and the Dead (episode currently unavailable), and an uncredited designer for Johnny and the Bomb (#Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem”).
    • In between Kirby and Kidby, presumably because it was the first Discworld book for younger readers, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (#Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids”) originally had cover art by David Wyatt.
    • Paul Kidby’s first Discworld covers weren’t for novels, but for other books – diaries, maps, the New Discworld Companion, and The Science of Discworld (#Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“). After collaborating on The Last Hero (#Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”), he took over the main Discworld covers beginning with Night Watch (#Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”), including the Tiffany Aching books. He did the original cover for Dodger (#Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh”), and later new covers for the Johnny books, and a deluxe illustrated edition of Good Omens.
    • The spin-off picture book Where’s My Cow? (#Pratchat62, “There’s a Cow in There”) had cover and interior art by Melvyn Grant.
    • The original UK cover of Nation (#Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl”) is by Johnny Duddle, who also did the interior artwork.
    • The Long Earth (#Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”) and all four of its sequels have covers designed by Rich Shailer, who also did all the exploded diagrams that appear on the inside.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#GNUKaos

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Due to a number of factors, including the death of beloved Pratcat Kaos, there’s no episode of Pratchat this month.

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Thanks to artist Owen Heitmann, who drew Kaos as part of the art for our subscriber-only podcast, Ook Club. Ben’s other bookshelf episode will appear in the subscriber-only Ook Club podcast feed later this month.

Please do check out some of the other Pratchett podcasts catalogued in The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.

We plan to be back in October with #Pratchat88, our episode about Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch and Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#PratchatShelfie – Browsing Ben’s Bookshelf

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Our August episode has been delayed, so here’s a bonus episode in which Ben talks about some of the books on his Pratchett shelf that won’t get their own episode!

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You can find all the books mentioned in this episode in the Books index on our website.

Some brief notes on this episode:

  • A “shelfie” is a photo of one’s shelf of books or board games, usually shared online.
  • The tie-in books Ben mentions are Where’s My Cow (see #Pratchat62, “There’s a Cow in There”), The World of Poo (as referenced in Snuff), Mrs Bradshaw’s Guide and Dodger’s Guide to London (see #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh”).
  • The published official Discworld maps are The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, The Discworld Mappe, Death’s Domain, A Tourist Guide to Lancre (now out of print), The Mappa Discworld, and the books The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas. There’s also a newer one Ben forgot: The Unreal Guide to Unseen University.
  • Paul Kidby’s first Discworld art book was The Pratchett Portfolio. It was followed by The Art of Discworld (the one with the “Mona Ogg” on the cover) in 2001.
  • Turtles All the Way Down was Marc Burrows’ companion volume for his biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett. It’s currently sold out, as is Tales From Roundworld, the collection of Pratchett rarities he gave away at early performances of his live show based on the biography.
  • Only the first four Discworld plays – the three Ben mentions, plus Wyrd Sisters – were published by Corgi. Fourteen more have been published by Methuen Drama (Bloomsbury), three by Oxford University Press, and three by Samuel French (Concord Theatricals). Find out more on Stephen Briggs’ website.
  • The public version of our video episode about the two versions of The Carpet People is on YouTube.
  • Mr Bunnsy Has an Adventure was published as a tie-in to The Amazing Maurice film, and was available from the official website. The store is still there, but not taking orders. You can however still get the book (as of November 2025) from Discworld.com – thanks listener Rowena for the tip off!
  • It turns out The Nac Mac Feegle’s Big Wee Alphabet Book is back in stock! (Though postage to Australia costs more than the book.) Please don’t buy up all the copies before we get a few, ye ken? Big thanks to listener Emily for the tip-off!
  • The new collections of Pratchett’s early children’s stories are quite different to the previous ones. Tales of Wizards and Dragons and Tales of Beasts and Bugs each collect a handful of stories with full colour illustrations by Pratchett children’s illustration Mark Beech. They’re new this year from Puffin, and so aimed at a younger audience. Beasts and Bugs comes out at the end of August 2025.

We’ll be back soon (hopefully later this month) with #Pratchat88, our episode about Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch and Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

#Pratchat87 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 87, “Exclusive Possession: Ankh-Morpork Edition”, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2011 Discworld board game, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, with guest Richard McKenzie.

Iconographic Evidence

The box and its contents, though only two player colours of tokens are on display here. The cards at the bottom are green and brown player cards; personality cards (the secret roles); area cards; and event cards.
The state of the board at the end of our second game. Ben was green, Richard was red, and Liz was blue.

Below are all the specific cards we mentioned this episode; you can also find lots more photos of the game on its BoardGameGeek page.

Photo of the seven personality cards from the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork board game: Dragon King of Arms; Commander Vimes; Chrysoprase; Lord Vetinari; Lord Selachii; Lord Rust; Lord de Worde
The seven personalities.
Photo of six player cards from the board game Discworld: Ankh-Morpork.
The cards Mr Shine, Dr Whiteface, The Fools’ Guild, Gaspode, The Fresh Start Club and Igor.
Photo of six player cards from the board game Discworld: Ankh-Morpork.
The player cards The Luggage, Shonky Shop, Wallace Sonky, Harry King, Mrs Cake and CMOT Dibbler.
Photo of six player cards from the board game Discworld: Ankh-Morpork.
The player cards Errol, The Fire Brigade, History Monks, Sergeant Angua, The Peeled Nuts, and DEATH.
Photo of six player cards from the board game Discworld: Ankh-Morpork.
The player cards Moist von Lipwig, Rincewind, Mr Slant, Wee Mad Aerthur, Hubert and Carcer.
Photo of four player cards from the board game Discworld: Ankh-Morpork.
The player cards Ruby, Harga’s House of Ribs, Susan and Zorgo the Retrophrenologist.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to Exclusive Possession the suspiciously Monopoly-like game to which a dying person once challenged Death. Death briefly mentions this in Reaper Man. (He was the boot.)
  • Richard previously appeared on #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House” discussing Pyramids, and #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, discussing The Fifth Elephant.
  • We only mention them a little, but the other (official) Discworld board games are:
    • Thud (2002, designed by Trevor Truran) – a Hafltafl-style game in which one side of pieces are dwarfs, and the other are trolls. As seen in the novel Thud!, though as mentioned the game pre-dates the book! Discussed in the bonus episode #PratchatPlaysThud, “The Troll’s Gambit” with guest Dr Melissa Rogerson.
    • Guards! Guards! A Discworld Board Game (2011; designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw) – players take on the role of various Guilds who recruit various Discworld characters to help track down the missing spells from the Octavo. We played it for #Pratchat75, “…And That Spells Trouble” with guest Dr Melissa Rogerson.
    • The Witches (2013, designed by Martin Wallace) – a semi-cooperative game in which the players take on the role of Tiffany Aching and her fellow apprentice witches, solving problems around the Ramtops. We discussed it in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”, with guest Steve Lamattina.
    • Clacks: A Discworld Board Game (2015; designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw) – players are Clacks operators competing to send their messages the fastest – or collaborating to send a message before Moist von Lipwig can deliver it via horse… Discussed in #Pratchat82, “Clack Go the Gears”, with guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung.
  • We mention a lot of other board games in this episode; some we have more to say about below, but here are most of them in a handy list with BoardGameGeek links and a brief description:
    • Ticket to Ride (2004, designed by Alan R. Moon) – a popular gateway game still going strong after all these years. Players take turns to collect sets of coloured cards and play them to place trains on a map of the US (or various other countries in other editions), trying to complete routes between specific cities for points. It’s easy to learn and plays pretty fast, but if you’ve played a few board games already, you might like to consider some of the alternatives in this video from No Pun Included.
    • Gloom (2005, designed by Keith Baker) – a storytelling card game in which you try to have the most miserable life in a very miserable family. It’s fun schtick is that the cards are transparent, and you layer them on top of each other. There’s also a Cthulhu version, and a handful of others, including one based on Game of Thrones.
    • Big Trouble in Little China: The Game (2018, designed by Christopher Batarlis, Boris Polonsky and Jim Samartino) – a miniatures-based game, adapted from John Carpenter’s 1986 action-comedy movie starring Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall and James Hong. Up to four players take on the roles of characters from the film to collaboratively defeat the sorcerer Lo Pan, who is trying to lift a curse so he can return to his evil ways. We think Richard might have found an actual playthrough video, though; this how to play video is only 12 minutes long!
    • Magic: The Gathering (1993, designed by Richard Garfield) – the first and still the most successful collectible card game, or trading card game. Buy packs of random cards and build a deck consisting of lands which give you points of “mana” in one of five colours, and spells that spend that mana to summon creatures and otherwise attack your opponent.
    • Talisman (1983, designed by Robert Harris) – originally published by Games Workshop, this game sort of resembles fantasy Monopoly. Players roll dice to move one of many different characters around a board to land on spaces where something good or bad might happen to them as they seek the “Crown of Command” to win the game. There are several “levels” to move through, and as Richard mentions, lots of expansions which add even more.
    • Blood on the Clocktower (2022, designed by Steven Medway) – a modern social deduction game – essentially a much more sophisticated version of Werewolf. Players live in a village struck down by a curse of some kind; everyone has a unique role, and tries to figure out which of them is possessed by a murderous demon – or conceal the demon, to further their own evil plans. The game comes with multiple scenarios and a large number of unique roles, and players are able to continue influencing the game even if their character is killed.
    • Pandemic (2008) – we mention this every board game episode, because it’s one of Ben’s favourites. Collaboratively try to collect samples to cure four rampant diseases before they overwhelm the world. The game’s mechanisms have been adapted to everything from Cthulhu to World of Warcraft, Star Wars, Ancient Rome and most recently Lord of the Rings. Designed by Matt Leacock, whose other similar games include Thunderbirds, the Forbidden series, and the “solve climate change” game Daybreak, co-designed with Matteo Menapace.
    • Mythos (1996, designed by Charlie Krank) – another collectible card game from the 1990s, Mythos was a Cthulhu-themed game in which you scored points by telling stories about your investigator’s adventures. Ben still has a bunch of cards and is hoping to play it again soon.
    • Oath (2021, designed by Cole Wehrle) – beautiful and colourful, Oath is more or less a wargame about the fight over the throne in a fantasy kingdom. It’s often bigged up for creating interesting stories, but Ben has found it wanting in that department. He’s willing to give it another go, though – not least because it was very expensive. The Discworld fan conversion Ben mentioned is by BGG user dugbride, and basically transforms every card in the game into a Discworld equivalent. Heads up that it uses entirely AI-generated art.
    • Cluedo (1949) – an old-school deduction game in which players move around a map of a mansion gathering cards representing clues to a murder. By slowly figuring out which person, weapon and location are missing from the deck, they race to be the first to put the solution together. The original American name is Clue, but the name more familiar to the rest of the world is a pun on “clue” and “Ludo”. Like Monopoly, it’s been released in many themed versions, though it’s usually modified a little more than Monopoly. A lot of the themes have been TV shows, like Brooklyn-99, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Doctor Who and Bob’s Burgers. (In more family friendly versions, the crime is no longer a murder.)
  • The board game video by Aunty Donna is “Explaining a Board Game” from April 2020.
  • There are three editions of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, and you can find photos of all three on BoardGameGeek:
    • The standard edition, the one Ben owns and the one you’ll most likely find secondhand, comes in a standard square-shaped box the same size as Ticket to Ride. It has a painting of Great A’Tuin on the cover (which we think is the art by Paul Kidby). This has the regular wooden pieces seen in our photos, with cardboard coins. It was published by Treefrog Games and Esdevium in the UK, Mayfair Games in the US, KOSMOS in Germany, Phalanx Games in Poland, and a few others in other European countries.
    • The Collector’s Edition comes in a rectangular box with alternate art of a dragon flying over Ankh-Morpork by the game’s main artist Peter Dennis. This version includes wooden coins, a custom d12 with “no eight”, a larger board, and a poster of Peter Dennis’ card designs.
    • The Deluxe Edition is the same as the Collector’s Edition except that it replaces the minions, buildings, trolls and demons with resin miniatures. Ben particularly likes the demons in this version, which better match the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions in the books than the wooden horned demon tokens.
  • The Ankh-Morpork map on the board seems to be based on The Streets of Ankh-Morpork by Steven Player, the first official published map of the city. It lines up pretty well with that version of the city, though there are likely a few more differences with the later Compleat Ankh-Morpork. Note that some fan sources treat the board game map as canonical, including using the names of the areas as names for neighbourhoods or suburbs of the city. While most are drawn from the books, some seem to be an invention for game purposes.
  • The part of the kidney that Liz thought Ankh-Morpork resembled is the glomerulus.
  • The card that lets you add a minion without adding trouble is Mr Shine.
  • “Mulligan” is a term used in games for when a player is allowed to have another go at something to keep the game competitive and fun. It may have originated in golf, or possibly baseball, and dates back to at least the 1930s, though its exact origins are unknown. A mulligan in golf is only for casual play, but is where a golfer is allowed to take a shot again from the same position when they lose their ball. Another well-known use is in Magic: The Gathering, where it is an official rule that a player can choose to take a “mulligan” and re-draw their initial hand of cards for the game, albeit with an increasing penalty for multiple mulligans in most most formats of the game.
  • As far as we know, there has never been a Discworld: Ankh-Morpork tournament. An opportunity for a future Discworld convention, perhaps?
  • Nanty Narking (2019) is the “re-implementation” of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork plublished by PHALANX. Re-implementation is board game jargon for re-using the same (or significantly similar) rules with a new theme or narrative – in this case, fictional Victorian London. As Ben mentions in the footnote, the main rules changes are a tweak to the Chrysoprase personality card, and some alternate rules for more advanced play. That includes the alternate personalities Ben mentioned – and you can find Ankh-Morpork versions of those on BoardGameGeek – but also an “Agent & Buildings” variant which introduces two additional sets of cards. Players are dealt three Agent cards and one Building card at the start of the game; these are initially hidden, and provide specific additional powers which interact with the player’s Agents (equivalent to Ankh-Morpork’s Minions) or Buildings on the board.
  • The Cthulhu expansion for Nanty Narking is titled Nanty Narking: The Rise of Cthulhu, and was funded by a successful campaign on GameFound (a crowdfunding platform specifically for games) in February 2025, raising over €200,000. As of July 2025, you can still join the campaign via a “late pledge” to get discounted copies of the expansion and a new printing of the base game, as well as some other bits exclusive to the campaign. The expansion adds a lot: players can now play as “Great Old Ones” attempting to take over London, using giant miniatures, powerful “Elder Ones” who are like Agents (the game’s version of minions) but with special powers, and many additions to existing elements of the game. It seems to evoke similar themes to Wallace’s 2024 Cthulhu in Victorian London game, Cthulhu: Dark Providence by CMON Games, part of their Cthulhu: Death May Die game setting. (This is itself a re-implementation of Wallace’s 2013 game A Study in Emerald, based loosely on the short story by Neil Gaiman.)
  • We’re pretty loose with the game’s terminology. We don’t recommend anyone learn to play from our description, but we thought we’d clarify a few game terms and rules:
    • The board is divided into twelve “City Areas”, each representing a district or neighbourhood, like The Shades, Dolly Sisters, the Unreal Estate or The Scours. Each has a corresponding City Area Card (the game is very good at naming things plainly), which gives a player a specific benefit: usually a simple ability they can use once per turn, like gaining $2. A City Area Card is claimed when a player builds a building in the corresponding area (not by controlling an area as we repeatedly say; see below), and only one building can be in each City Area. In the (relatively rare) event that a building is destroyed, the player loses the corresponding City Area Card.
    • A player controls a City Area by having more pieces (minions or buildings) in the area than any other single player. This has no special effect aside from helping to satisfy the win condition of the three Lord personalities.
    • Ben refers to Rincewind’s power to draw a “special ability”, but what he means is the Random Event cards that include (among other things) a riot, a dragon attack, or adding trolls or demons to the board. All wizards have the octogram symbol that requires a player to draw a Random Event; this is the only action that is not optional. These are quite rare in the first half of the game.
  • The Discworld train game was shared with us by subscriber Lachlan, who’s a big fan of train games. The game in question is an “18xx” game – part of a family of games which all draw inspiration from the 1970s game 1829 designed by Francis Tresham. Each game has its own quirks, and there are two main “lineages” which take the form in different directions; many of them take a long time to play. A major theme of these games is that players don’t have their own train company; but instead are buying stock (i.e. shares, not train stock) in private train companies, which become active when they receive enough investment. The player with the most stock in a company then gets to spend the company’s money and choose how it operates, hoping to make money and then decided what to do with its profits, affecting its stock price. BoardGameGeek lists nearly 300 18xx games, some which adapt the rules to other themes, and there are many more fan-made games as well. The one Lachlan brought to our attention is called “18DW” or “18Discworld”; it was based heavily on Raising Steam, and includes one major company, forty-seven private companies and “attacks by fundamentalist dwarves”, among other things. The only evidence of the game is a photo on a BoardGameGeek list of 18XX expansions in progress (it’s #124 in that list), and an online auction listing for a seemingly finished version of the game that lists the designer’s name as Christopher Bird. Perhaps this was the only copy? As an unlicensed fan game, its unlikely to ever fully see the light of day, but its nice to know someone out there has a copy. (Sorry it’s not you Lachlan!)
  • There are indeed fan expansions and variants of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, as well as fan recreations of the game to deal with the fact that it’s long out of print! Most add additional personalities, player cards and event cards, though some also add new pieces as well. You can find discussions of a bunch of these – including the Discworld adaptations of the variant personalities from Nanty Narking – in the game’s Variants forum on BoardGameGeek.
  • We’ve previously discussed the history of Monopoly and its origins as The Landlord’s Game in #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory”. The 99% Invisible podcast has a good overview of this history in episode 189, “The Landlord’s Game“. The website landlords-game.com has lots of info about the multiple versions of Elizabeth Magie’s original game, and has brought one of them back into print!
  • Not only is Elton John Monopoly real, but it’s recent – released in March 2025, and available via Elton John’s official merch store. It renames (but doesn’t remodel) the houses and hotels as stands and stadiums, and replaces the traditional playing pieces with iconic pieces of Elton’s headgear.
  • You can find Thinker Themer on YouTube. They’ve made a lot of videos, but currently are focussing on their “Shelfworthy?” series of reviews. If you like their channel, you can support them by buying their merch – their logo is super cool!
  • Armello (2015) is a digital board game from Melbourne developers League of Geeks. As described by Richard, it has a fairytale talking animals theme in which the old king (a lion) is paranoid and dying after a corruption has taken hold of the land. Players take on the role of various animals vying to be the next monarch, though means fair or foul. Armello is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, XBox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Android. It remains a reasonably popular multiplayer game, and in its final update in 2022, added crossplay, supporting multiplayer between different platforms. A tabletop version of the game, designed by Rob Heinsoo, was crowdfunded in 2024 and is expected to be published in 2025 by Australian company King of the Castle Games.

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#Pratchat86 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 86, “Of the Watch the Last”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-ninth Discworld novel, 2011’s Snuff, with guest Freyja Stokes.

Iconographic Evidence

Watch this space!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title adapts one of the common formats for goblin names to describe Snuff in bittersweet terms. The book is the eighth and last in the Watch sub-series, though characters from the Watch books do appear in the final two Discworld novels. (No spoilers about who, though.)
  • There are several publicly available theses and academic articles about Terry Pratchett and/or Discworld from Australian scholars, most (but not all) the result of the Pratchett Scholarship at UniSA. Here are are a few we’ve found; references are in Australian Government (author-date) style.
  • There are several published collections of Pratchett-related academic writing, including:
    • Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works (Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell (eds), 2014)
    • Philosophy and Terry Pratchett (Jacob Heald and James B South (eds), 2014)
    • Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods – Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Marion Rana (ed), 2018)
    • Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond (Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin (eds), 2020)
    • Powers and Society in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Building a Fantasy Civilization (Justine Breton (ed), 2025)
  • How Christie wrote her mysteries – going back and putting the clues in afterwards
  • Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was a series of historical crime novels starring glamorous sleuth Phryne Fisher (played by Essie Davis in the television adaptation, which was produced from 2012 to 2015; there was a film too, but forget that, just watch the show). Mostly set in Melbourne, the books were written by Australian author Kerry Greenwood, who sadly passed away on 26 March 2025, aged 70. Greenwood was, by all accounts, a delightful person. GNU Kerry Greenwood. We’ve previously mentioned Phryne in #Pratchat37 (about Johnny and the Bomb) and #Pratchat75 (about the Guards! Guards! boad game), as well as the bonus episode #EeekClub2023.
  • Downton Abbey was a hit British television series about fictional aristocratic family the Granthams and their servants, set in their eponymous country estate in the early twentieth century. It ran for six series on ITV between 2010 and 2015, and two feature films in 2019 and 2022. We’ve previously talked about it, most notably in #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum), #Pratchat48 (about Thief of Time) and #Pratchat61 (about the previous Watch book, Thud!).
  • The children’s authors we mentioned who scratch the itch of “gross stuff for kids” were:
  • We had to cut Freyja’s explanation of spontaneous human combustion for time, but the short version is that it happened to people sitting in armchairs which, at that time, were stuffed with and covered in extremely flammable materials. Even a small spark or ember would cause them to go up instantly in a fire so hot, it rendered a human body quickly into ash. Only the sitter’s outstretched foot would escape. Charles Dickens did indeed believe in it; a character dies from spontaneous human combustion in Bleak House.
  • The book series Freyja mentions with the harp-playing subjugated alien is Sheri S. Tepper’s Marjorie Westriding trilogy, set on the planet of Hobbs Land, hence the alternate name “Hobbs Land Gods”. We think the specific book is probably the second one, Raising the Stones.

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#Pratchat84 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 84, “Eight Days an Opening”, discussing the compilations of Terry Pratchett’s and Stephen Briggs’ diaries, 2019’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I, 2020’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume II, plus his 2004 collaboration with Bernard Pearson, The Discworld Almanak.

Iconographic Evidence

Bojack Horseman, the animated sitcom about a fading TV star in a world shared by humans and anthropormorphic animals, has done the generic song gag several times – not just for the 1990s, but for the 1980s and specifically 2007 as well.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the Beatles song “Eight Days a Week”, and one standard way to describe diary layouts: the more standard “seven days to an opening” means that a two-page spread shows all seven days of the week. Other standard layouts include one, two or five days to an opening (for business diaries that don’t include weekends).
  • The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Volume I was first published on 14th November, 2019, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Unseen University Diary 1998
    • Discworld Assassins’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2000
    • Discworld Thieves’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2002
    • Ankh-Morpork Post Office Handbook Diary 2007
  • The Celebrated Discworld Almanak (usually just referred to as The Discworld Almanak) was published in October 2004.
  • The Ankh-Mopork Archives, Volume II was first published on 15th September, 2020, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999
    • Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001
    • Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary 2003
    • Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008
  • The 1995 Australian Fannish Diary (not 1996) was created by Kerri Valkova & Ian Gunn. While Ben mis-remembered the year it was produced, he did use its note section to write down what Douglas Adams was saying during his appearance at the Somerset Celebration of Literature, also in 1995, not 1996.

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#Pratchat85 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 85, “AT LAST, SIR TERRY”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”, with guest Myfanwy Coghill.

Iconographic Evidence

The full televised speech, as mostly read by Tony Robinson, is currently available on YouTube.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is taken from the first line of the tweets sent out by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett to publicly announce Pratchett’s death, which is still (as of March 2025) available:
  • Myf last appeared as a guest for #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, discussing Maskerade, in September 2019.
  • Avocation comes from the same Latin root as vocation, but rather than meaning “called to”, it means “called away”. It is used these days to refer to something which is not someone’s main occupation, but their true passion outside of work.
  • Mortuary work refers to work done on the body of a deceased person, including embalming and other forms of preservation or restoration to make the body suitable for viewing.
  • The 10th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death will be on the 12th of March, 2025. In the first published version of this episode, Ben incorrectly gives the date of his death as the 15th of March in a footnote; it turns out there’s a mistake in the proof copy of the official biography, A Life With Footnotes*, which he used to double check! (It might be a deliberate mistake, to help detect piracy – in the vein of trap-streets in street directories.) A corrected episode should be out by the time you read this, but apologies if you got the incorrect version.
  • Pratchett’s documentary about assisted dying was Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, produced in 2011 for BBC Scotland. It was broadcast in the UK on the 13 June 2011, and had its American premiere at the 2011 North American Discworld Convention in Madison, Wisconsin (yes, that Madison). The film won several television awards, including a Scottish BAFTA, a Royal Television Society award, and an Emmy for Best Documentary.
  • We’ve so far been unable to determine if “Shaking Hands with Death” or any of Pratchett’s documentaries were broadcast in Australia, though we have heard anecdotally that a couple of the BBC ones were. If you know, please let us know!
  • “Space Pilot 3000”, the first episode of Futurama which features a suicide booth, was first broadcast on 28 March, 1999 on Fox. The show follows Fry, a pizza delivery boy who is accidentally frozen in suspended animation for a thousand years on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and wakes in the year 3000, heavily inspired by retro-futuristic cartoons. Matt Groening says the inspiration for the suicide booth was a Donald Duck cartoon from 1937, Modern Inventions, in which Donald is nearly killed by a variety of devices in a “Museum of the Future”. They appear in a further ten Futurama episodes (and telemovies), an in-universe appear to have been around for a very long time – since at least 2008! In fiction, there are examples of similar devices dating back to the 1890s, including the 1895 short story “The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert W. Chambers. In his speech, Pratchett refers to Martin Amis’ facetious mention of suicide booths in a 2010 interview with The Times (no longer available online), in which an elderly user would also be given “a martini and a medal”. Neither side of the euthenasia were particularly pleased, but as Prachett points out, it did get people talking.
  • “That dog episode” of Futurama is “Jurassic Bark”, from the show’s fifth season, first broadcast on 17 November, 2002. In the episode, protagonist Fry finds that archaeologists have discovered the pizza parlour where he used to work as a delivery boy one thousand years earlier – including the remains of Fry’s now fossilised dog. Along with other artefacts is a fossilised dog – Fry’s own dog, Seymour, who Fry decides to clone, Jurassic Park style. It’s generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and was nominated for an Emmy.
  • David Harewood OBE gave the 2023 Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was titled “75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving in this country”. The HMT Empire Windrush was originally the MV Monte Rosa, a German passenger ship seized by the British after World War II. In 1948, the Empire Windrush brought more than one thousand passengers, most of them West Indian, to England, a voyage that became a famous symbol of post-war migration to the United Kingdom. This group of migrants are sometimes referred to as the “Windrush generation”, and among them were members of Harewood’s own family.
  • The Reith Lectures are a similar lecture series broadcast annually on BBC Radio, and which are also available as a podcast; you can find an archive of the lectures at the BBC. The lecture Myf mentions was given by forensic psychotherapist Gwen Adshead in 2024, and is titled “Four Questions About Violence”.
  • Rob Wilkins was indeed a “Stunt Pratchett” during a talk at the Sydney Opera House, but that was on 17 April, 2011 – more than a year after the Richard Dimbleby Lecture. So its understandable he may have been nervous about doing it for the first time for national television! We’ve previously mentioned this event in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, as the event was chaired by that episode’s guest, Garth Nix! You can still find it as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast, currently available on Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”.
  • Tony Robinson produced the documentary Tony Robinson: Me and My Mum in 2006, as part of Channel 4’s series The Trouble with Old People. It covered his difficulties in finding a care home for his mother, who also suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and includes her life and death in the home. Robinson is still an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society; last year he featured the Society’s Director of Research and Innovation, Fiona Carragher, on an episode of his podcast Cunningcast. The episode is titled “DEMENTIA Action Week: A Defining Year”, and was released on 16 May 2024.
  • The BBC Big Read was a survey conducted in 2003, with more than 750,000 responses. Pratchett’s entries in the final list of one hundred were, in order: Mort (#65); Good Omens (#68); Guards! Guards! (#69); Night Watch (#73); and The Colour of Magic (#93).
  • The line “I never saved anything for the swim back” is from the science fiction film Gattaca (1997, dir. Andrew Niccol), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. We won’t say too much, since the line comes fairly close to the end, but it still holds up and is worth a watch.
  • Death’s scene with the swan is in Maskerade, as is the scene where Granny Weatherwax plays cards with Death for the life of a newborn baby. After Death lets her win, she notices he has a shoulder injury and pops his arm back into place for him. As he’s leaving, Death asks her what she would have done if she’d lost. Granny replies with a smile: ‘Well, for a start … I’d have broken your bloody arm.’
  • The Pitt is a 2025 American medical drama on HBO’s Max streaming service. It’s set in the emergency department of a fictional hospital in Pittsburgh. The show’s first season covers one 15-hour shift in the ED, which is nicknamed “The Pitt”. It stars Noah Wyle (best known for playing another doctor in ER) as a senior attending physician, alongside a cast of younger doctors, including students, interns and residents.
  • Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher probably best known for his idea of the “collective unconscious” – that humans have in common a set of instincts (basic desires) and archetypes (universal symbols). Despite much criticism and evolution of thought in psychology, Jung’s theories remain very popular.
  • Rumpelstiltskin is the German version of a folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Similar stories appear in many cultures; it’s known in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 500, “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”. The titular character, usually described as an imp, is not summoned by anything in particular except desperation on the part of the heroine, who has been given the impossible task of spinning straw into gold, as her father boasted she could. If she does not, she will be killed. Rumpelstiltskin completes the task but in return asks for her first born child. Some years later, the women has married the prince and become Queen, and the imp returns for his payment when the child is born. When she protests, he gives her a chance: he will give up the child if she can guess his name, but she has only three days to work it out. His own pride is eventually his undoing, since the King eventually discovers his name by coming across his house in the woods, and secretly watching him as he dances and sings a song to himself about how she will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. Therea re many variations, including some from Nordic countries, and the British Isles, some explicitly making the Rumpelstiltskin character a demon of some kind.
  • The Reddit carbon monoxide leak story is from 2015, posted on r/legaladvice as “[MA] Post-it notes left in apartment.” In 2018 the story was made into an episode of the podcast The Endless Thread, “Something Wicked”.
  • Dignity in Dying is a UK not-for-profit, membership supported campaigning organisation originally formed in 1935 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society. They also have a sister organisation, Compassion in Dying, formed in 2008. Compassion in Dying do not campaign for changes in the law, but are a registered charity that helps individuals to talk about and make decisions related to their own deaths, including legal and administrative assistance for things like living wills, Do Not Resusciatate orders and giving power of attorney to trusted loved ones.
  • Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585) was a 16th-century English composer primarily of choral music. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth gave Tallis and his later contemporary William Byrd an exclusive letters patent for printing music and music paper in England, which made sure his music was perfomed across the British Isles and preserved into the modern day. Most of his works are religious, and the best known include Lamentations of Jeremiah, Miserere nostri, and Spem in alium.
  • Unity LeJean is an Auditor in Thief of Time who so well creates a human body that she develops human thoughts and sensibilities. We discussed Unity’s life and death in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”.
  • While we have not been able to find any documented cases of people being coerced into assisting dying, it is notable that reasons like “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”, “isolation or loneliness” and financial issues are often cited as reasons by those accessing assisted dying in Canada and Oregon. Meanwhile in the UK, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, 187 assisted suicide cases were referred to them by police between April 2009 and March 2024. Only 24 of those proceded without being withdrawn, mostly because they failed the test of being in the public interest. Of those, eight became cases of other crimes, including homicide; one resulted in acquittal; four were successfully prosecuted; and six are still ongoing. They don’t say what happened to the other five, but we infer that most of those with were withdrawn by police or with which the CPS didn’t proceed failed a public interest test, which maybe suggests they are the sort of thing that would be legalised under assisted dying laws.
  • “The Appointment in Samarra” is an ancient Mesopotamian tale which dates back to the Babylonian Talmud. The best-known modern version derives from Sheppey, the last play written by English writer W. Somerset Maugham, in 1933. Towards the end of the play, the title character – an Irishman who has won the lottery, but decides to spent the winnings on charity – is visited by Death. When he muses that he should have bought a new home on the Isle of Sheppey, as he considered earlier in the play, death gives a brief monologue recounting the story of the Appointment in Samarra. It is definitely worth a google, though you may find the top result is the 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra by American writer John O’Hara, who included Somerset Maugham’s version in his book after he was shown it Dorothy Parker and was inspired to change the title of the novel.
  • The Google search engine was launched in 1998, the first search engine to use back-link data to algorithmically rank pages by importance in search results. Exactly when it became the most popular search engine is hard to guage, but the phrase “to google” meaning “to search on the Internet” had entered popular usage by 2002, so Google was certainly firmly entrenched by 2010.
  • Assisted dying laws in Australia are state legislation, like most other medical law. Ben isn’t quite correct; every state has an active assisted dying law, but the two Australian territories do not (yet). The laws have many similar restrictions, and are seen as quite strict compared to legislation in other countries: patients must be legal adults, have a terminal illness with a life expectany of twelve months or less, and be in severe pain. There are also administrative barriers in terms of how and when a patient can make the request. The laws differ in many other ways, including who is allowed to give life-ending medication, how doctors must behave if they object to such a treatment, and who is allowed to suggest voluntary assisted dying (complicated further by federal laws prohibiting the discussion of suicide over carriage services, which includes telehealth). As of March 2025, the situation in each state is:
    • The Northern Territory previously had the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, making it the first jurisdiction in Australia to legalise assisted dying. The conservative federal government of the time disagreed with the law, and introduced the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which made it illegal for territories to pass laws permitting assisted dying. This was repealed by the the Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022. A panel reported findings on possible new legislation for the Northern Territory in 2024, but no new law has yet been proposed.
    • Victoria was the first state to pass assisted dying legislation, with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. It came into effect on 19 June 2019. Amendments to the bill to get it passed also increased funding for palliative care in regional areas. It served as a model for legislation in most of the other states.
    • Western Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019, which came into effect on 1 July 2021.
    • Tasmania has the End-of-Life Choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Act 2021, which came into effect on 23 October 2022.
    • Queensland has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 1 January 2023.
    • South Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 31 January 2023.
    • New South Wales has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022, which came into effect on 28 November 2023.
    • The Australian Capital Territory passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2024 on 5 June 2024, which comes into effect on 3 November 2025.
  • When Ben mentions that the government has introduced and then taken away support for those with disabilities, he’s referring to changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), first introduced by the Gillard government near the end of their time in office, in 2013. This is a government scheme that supports those under the age of 65 with permanent disabilities, including medical costs, equipment and services. Successive conservative governments did not do the scheme any favours, capping the number of staff at its Agency well below projected need, and making changes to its leadership. In 2024 major reforms were passed in legislation by the Albanese Labor government, but while these were supposedly based on recommendations from an independent review of the scheme, they were criticised for effectively removing support from many disabled Australians, who are already underserved by the scheme.
  • The Victorian death pyramid – more properly known as the “Metropolitan Sepulchre” – was a pyramid-shaped necropolis proposed by the architect Thomas Willson in 1829. It was meant to address the shortage of burial space in London, and would have been built in Primrose Hill. The design was “nearly four times the height of St Paul’s” (about 90 stories), with external stairs and an obervatory at the top; it has a potential capacity of five million corpses. Even at the time, it was considered “extraordinary” and “absurd”. Surprisingly, and to Ben’s disappointment, 99% Invisible don’t appear to have done an episode (or even a mini-story) about this.
  • The infant mortality rate in Victorian London was very high, especially compared to the overall death rate, which had otherwise declined. Some sources place the infant mortality rate at over 300 in 1,000 births in 1800. One pamphlet from 1862 noted that in 1859, two in every five deaths was of an infant aged five or under, and half of those – one in five deaths – was of babies under a year in age. These observations led to activism around child health and safety, and reforms and initiatives including bottle feeding of babies.
  • Liz has previously mentioned the Melbourne General Cemetery in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”; the latter episode is no longer available.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.