Author: Ben

#Pratchat83 – This Time for Ankh-Morpork

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Liz and Ben are joined by guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) to chat about fashion, faith, food…oh, and football. Yes, join us for an episode that goes well into extra time (i.e. it’s over 3 hours long) as we discuss Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals.

The Wizards of Unseen University are still recovering from the Dean’s defection to become Archchancellor of rival Brazeneck College, but they have a bigger problem: if they don’t field a foot-the-ball team, they’ll lose the bequest that supplies most of their dinners. But the sport has become lawless and violent – a game of the streets in which matches last long into the night and players die. And then there’s the fans… But something’s in the air. The game’s about to change, and at the centre of it are an unlikely quartet of junior University staff: Glenda the sensible baker; beautiful and fashion-conscious Juliet; Trev, son of the game’s greatest player; and Mr Nutt, a goblin who’s good at everything – except explaining who and what he is…

The last of the Discworld books to “star” the wizards, and the longest in the series by a fair margin, Unseen Academicals repeatedly says that it isn’t really about football. And, indeed, there’s a lot else going on: new ways for both dwarfs and trolls to express their femininity; the internal voices which hold us back from reaching our potential; the struggle between progress and fairness, of power and the people. And at the heart of it, four brand new characters who represent a side of Ankh-Morpork we don’t usually see in our protagonists: the regular people, caught up in the Shove.

What did you think of Unseen Academicals? Does it have enough football in it, or too much? What are your favourite takes on orcs? What other sports would you like to see come to the Discworld? And do you know where we can get a megapode? Shout out from the Shove using the hashtag #Pratchat83!

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Guest Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics) (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy and cosy crime. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Tansy recently reprinted her “Teacup Magic” series of cosy mysteries, and her newest novel is the time travel comedy Time of the Cat. You can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media; you’ll also find her in our previous live episodes: “A Troll New World” (from Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019) and “Unalive from Überwald” (from Nullus Anxietas IX in 2024).

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we’re looking at a stack of Discworld ephemera – namely both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! If you’ve read any of those, please send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media. Use the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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.

#Pratchat82 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 82, “Clack Go the Gears”, discussing Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw’s 2015 board game Clacks, based on Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, with guests Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung.

Iconographic Evidence

A photograph of the Clacks board game components laid out on a small table in front of the box. These include the board; square wooden lamp tokens; small wooden “meeples” - humanoid playing pieces - for one player and for the Post Office; a cardboard “Deep Dwarf” token; wooden Clacks tower pieces; the game manual; the large Clacks code reference card; a cloth bag filled with square jacquards; an egg timer; and the cards for Clacks message words, fault and incident reports, and operator’s logs.
The original edition of Clacks with all the components for a solo game laid out.
The box art for the original edition of Clacks.
The, set up with lamp tiles, one player meeple, and some Clacks tower markers.
The Clacks manual, made to look like a techincal manual for a Clacks tower.
Example Clacks message cards.
Some of the jacquards, with the patterns of lights they can affect.
Two of the three types of cards: Fault Reports, used in the competitive game, and Incident Reports, used in cooperative and solo games.
A competitive game in progress – note this is before Ben fell behind everyone else…
The end of Ben’s solo game – pipped at the post by Moist von Lipwig!
Ben’s words for the solo game.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title repurposes “Click Go the Shears”, a popular Australian folk song about sheep shearers. The song’s lyrics were first published as “The Bare-Belled Ewe” in 1891, though the original author is known only as “C. C.”. It’s set to the American Civil War tune “Ring the Bell, Watchman” by Henry Clay Work from 1865, and the first verse parodies the lyrics of the original. It wasn’t widely popular until it was republished and recorded in the 1950s, but is now very well known. Ben used “gears” for the rhyme in the title, but of course it’s the shutters that make the clacking noise in the towers. Ben had a go at a full Clacks-based chorus:
    Clack go the shutters, boys, clack clack clack!
    Quick eye and hands as you send a signal back
    Check it twice for errors and then add it to the queue
    And watch the drop so you don’t end up as a GNU!
  • Nick and Lawrence were previously guests to discuss Going Postal in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”, back in December 2020. We also have notes for that episode, which include quite a bit about the real-world precedents for the Clacks.
  • Ben’s had a look but so far hasn’t been able to identify the craft book that showed him how to make a zither. We’ll add it if he does! A zither, by the way, is a wooden stringed instrument with no neck. It looks and sounds a bit like a cross between a harp and a guitar.
  • The correct name for the “craw” of a zither or other wooden string instrument is, in fact…sound hole! Who’d have thought. Holes with specific shapes can have more specific names, like the “f-holes” in violins.
  • The Collector’s Edition of Clacks was released in 2021. While Ben is correct in his footnote that it was originally planned for the 5th anniversary in 2020, its official name is “Collector’s Edition”; it just also has “5th Anniversary” written in the top left corner of the box’s cover.
  • Mousetrap is a classic board game for children first published in 1963. Like many games of this era, it has a great gimmick, but is otherwise…not very good. In Mouse Trap’s case, the gimmick is a set of small plastic buckets, see-saws, ladders, balls, pipes and other household objects. As players roll dice and move their mice pieces around the path on the board, they gain and lose wedges or cards representing pieces of cheese, and assemble the toys into a Rube Goldberg-style contraption with a cage suspended over a final space. In the original design (including the 1986 Milton Bradley edition that Ben played as a child), the game ends with the players continuing to circle a final loop in the path on the board. One of these final spaces allows a player to rotate the crank that might set off the trap and capture a mouse, and the game ends when only one mouse is left. The original version includes a diver and a bathtub, though its been revised a few times – including getting rid of the final loop, and making the objective to collect the most cheese. A new version, first published in 2001, has a new trap design which replaces the bathtub with a toilet, but the original is still in print.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, the warning beacons of Gondor are bonfires on mountaintops used to signal alarm in the kingdom of Gondor. They are lit during The Return of the King; in the book there are seven, and they’re lit when news of the invading fleet of ships is received. In the film, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, refuses to call for aid, but Gandalf has Pippin light the beacon in Minas Tirith. There are nearly twice as many beacons in the film, which light up one by one until they are visible in Edoras, where Aragorn is trying to convince King Théoden to come to Gondor’s aid.
  • Wikisneaks, designed by Ben McKenzie and Jess Kilby, was played outside on the lawn of the State Library of Victoria as part of the playful program at the 2013 Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Not only could teams negate or steal other teams’ points, the number of points you scored determined how many pieces of a final puzzle you received! Much like in our game of Clacks, though, in the end the players all helped each other. You can find a description and photos of Wikisneaks on the old Pop Up Playground website.
  • Binary – in the computing sense – refers to systems which, at their simplest, are based on “bits” of data which can contain one of two pieces of information, usually rendered as zero or one. These bits are combined in larger groups to store more complex information; for example a byte stores eight bits, and is the basis of most modern computing systems. In old-school text encoding, each character – a letter, number or punctuation mark etc – is stored as a byte. In modern computing, the unicode standard – which attempts to store character information for every language – has versions that use 8, 16 and 32 bits, among others – though not a 6-bit one like the Clacks use.
  • Braille is a touch-based alphabet intended for use by blind and vision-impaired people. It uses patterns of raised dots in a two-by-three grid to represent letters and numbers, and it can be printed using embossing, or dynamically rendered using refreshable displays (which handily maps onto binary bits since each dot in the grid can be raised or flat). Notably the Clacks codes do not match Braille patterns, which should come as no surprise since they are intended to visually resemble the letters they represent. Braille was created by Louis Braille in 1824, originally in French, and intended as an improvement on a previous “night writing” alphabet. It is now used for writing more than a hundred languages around the world.
  • Pictionary is a party game first published in 1985, and was a massive hit at the time. It takes the parlour game of charades and translates the play-acting to drawing, while also providing a simple structure through the use of a board and prompt cards.
  • Klotz is not, as Ben mistakenly thought during the game, the name of a golem, but rather a place – probably in Überwald – mentioned in passing in Carpe Jugulum. It’s where vampires can be dispatched by having a lemon shoved into their mouth before being decapitated.
  • Many successful board games, especially simple and family friendly ones, have licensed variations tying in with all kinds of other brands. The undisputed king of this is Monopoly, which has had hundreds of versions tying in to everything from The Simpsons and Doctor Who, to the Olympics, the AFL (including specific teams), Harley Davison motorcycles and many many more. Monopoly almost never changes anything significantly – it just replaces the names and art on the board, and the design (and sometimes names) of the cards and money. Cluedo (or Clue in the US) is another popular one, though the original murder is often translated into another kind of mystery to suit the tone of the license; for example, in Friends Cluedo, the players are trying to discover which of the friends is keeping a secret, and what that secret is. Love Letter (see below) and Pandemic have also had this treatment, though the Star Wars and World of Warcraft versions of Pandemic are changed enough that they feel like distinct (though closely related) games.
  • Speaking of Pandemic, it’s a great example of action points in games. This is a mechanic (or kind of rule) in which a player has a limited number of points each turn to spend on taking specific actions. In a simple system, each action costs one point, but in some games – like Clacks – some actions will cost more points, further constraining the player’s choices. Often these choices are fixed, but Clacks attaches most of them to the jacquards; sometimes you can afford to play more than one, and sometimes you can’t.
  • We discussed The Witches board game in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. It’s a semi-cooperative game, and uses the most common version of that setup: the players have to work together to avoid losing as a team, but they are still competing to be the single winner at the end of the game.
  • Love Letter is a 2012 microgame designed by Seiji Kanai. It uses a deck of just sixteen cards (in the original version), each representing a person at court to whom a player is giving the love letter they want passed on to the Princess. While the theme is cute, the play is quite cutthroat, with players usually winning by eliminating their rivals; if there is more than one left at the end of a round, then the one with the highest-ranking member of court wins. It’s been reimplemented with many altered themes, including versions about writing to Santa, capturing Batman villains and – like every game at some stage, it seems – investigating the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Most alternate versions include at least a couple of extra or modified cards, and there are also multiple versions of the original with varying numbers of extra cards to accomodate more players. A second edition released in 2022 expanded the size of the deck to twenty-eight cards, but the original version and its main variations remain the most popular.
  • Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 2014 board game designed by Ted Alspach. Players try to build a castle that will please the random desires of a King loosely based on Ludwig II of Bavaria, who built a lot of fancy fairytale castles in the nineteenth century. As one of the only five board games Liz has ever played, we’ve previously mentioned it in #Pratchat21 “Memoirs of Agatea” (about Interesting Times), #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem” (about The Witches board game), and #Pratchat75, “…And That Spells Trouble”, (about the Guards! Guards! board game).
  • Wingspan is a hugely popular, multi award winning 2019 board game designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. Players try to attract birds to their three habitats, in an “engine-building” style of game play where you try to pick combinations of bird powers that will work well together to generate the most points by the end of the game. It’s very successful, not least because of the delightful theme and gorgeous watercolour bird art on the cards, and there have been multiple expansions adding birds from other parts of the world to the North American birds in the original. A more recent spin-off, Wyrmspan, swaps the birds for dragons and adds a bit more complexity.
  • Parasite is a 2019 comedy thriller South Korean film, written and directed by Bong Joon-Ho. It depicts the struggling Kim family, who scam their way into a number of jobs for the wealthy Park family.
  • Squid Game is a 2021 South Korean black comedy series made for Netflix, created by Hwang Dong-hyuk. In the series, poor Koreans are offered a chance to win massive cash prize by competing in a secret tournament of deadly versions of children’s games.
  • We previously talked about Mahjong way back in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumkinmobiles”, where we compared it to Cripple Mr Onion. It’s a Chinese game, usually for four players, which uses a set of 144 or more big clacky tiles, mostly “simples” numbered 1 to 9 in three suits, plus some “honours” and unique bonus tiles. Players begin with a hand of thirteen tiles, and take turns to discard ones they don’t want, draw new ones, and sometimes steal tiles discarded by other players. The aim is to collect and declare (by calling “Mahjong”) a named sets of tiles which meets a minimum number of points, decided in advance; the overall winner is the player with the highest cumulative score over several games. But it’s also important to know that there are as many (likely many more) variations on Mahjong as there are of poker, so you’ll want to learn the version your local community plays. To learn more, one place to start might be episode #211 of the Shut Up & Sit Down podcast about how they tried and failed to make a video review of Mahjong.
  • For more on how Leonard and David created Guards! Guards! and Clacks, we recommend listening to David Brashaw’s interview with our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret. You’ll find it in the episode “Picture Books and Board Games with Pratchat and David Brashaw” from 20 November 2023; David’s interview starts at around the 1 hour, 8 minutes and 45 seconds mark, after a discussion with Liz and Ben about Where’s My Cow?
  • We discussed Thud, the 2002 board game designed by Trevor Truran, back in #PratchatPlaysThud, “The Troll’s Gambit”; and Thud! the book in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”. There’s some commentary in both episodes, and their accompanying notes, about the way the game came about and inspired the novel.
  • BoardGameGeek, or BGG for short, is a fan-run board game database, very much the equivalent of the Internet Movie Database for games. It was created in 2000, and is still running strong. Its an excellent place to find details, photos and rules clarifications for board games of nearly any vintage; we’ve linked games mentioned in these notes to their entries on the site. You can find Ben on there under the username beejay.
  • The BGG rating system has been consistent for a long time. Any user with an account can rate any game with a score between 1 and 10, and given a weighted average score, which is what you see on the main page for a game. The official descriptions of what each rating mean relate not just to how much a player enjoyed the game, but how willing they are to play it again; for example, 10 is “Outstanding. Always want to play, expect this will never change.” and 1 is “Defies description of a game. You won’t catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.” Clacks currently has a score of 6.2, where 6 means: “Fair. Some fun or challenge at least, will play occasionally if in the right mood.” Ben’s definition for 7 is actually closer to that of 8; 7 is “Good. Usually willing to play.” while 8 is “Very good. Like to play, will probably suggest it, will never turn it down.”
  • A Fake Artist Goes to New York is the English translation of Jun Sasaki’s 2011 game エセ芸術家ニューヨークへ行く, one of a series of games in very small boxes from the company Oink Games. In the game, the players are all artists drawing a picture together, each adding one line at a time, without saying what they’re trying to draw. When the cards with the thing to be drawn are handed out, one random player gets a card that instead just says “fake” – so they don’t know! Their job is to guess what they’re drawing, while the other players have to try and guess which one of them was the fake artist. A similar game is Alexandr Ushan’s Spyfall from 2015, in which one player is a double agent who doesn’t know where the other spies are meeting. Players take it in turns to ask each other questions, hoping to either find out where they are, or identify the double agent.
  • The Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test, or UMAT, was a test used in Australia and New Zealand from the 1990s to the 2010s as a mandatory part of the selection process for medical students. Part 3 of the test dealt with “non-verbal reasoning”. The UMAT – along with a graduate equivalent, the GAMSAT – was created by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), but was eventually found to be a poor predictor of who would succeed in a medical degree. In 2019 it was replaced by the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT), an updated version of a test used in the UK since 2006.
  • Exploding Kittens is a 2015 card game created Matthew Inman, Elan Lee and Shane Small, the first to be published under the banner of Inman’s popular web comic The Oatmeal. The game involves drawing cards representing various kittens with different powers and abilities; if you draw the exploding kitten you lose the game, but the other kittens let you avoid this by putting the kitten back in the draw pile, forcing other players to draw cards, peeking at the top cards in the deck and so on. It was notable at the time for being the biggest Kickstarter game project ever, raising more than eight million dollars; it’s still the fourth biggest game crowdfunding campaign ever, and there have been many expansions, spin-offs and other games from the same studio. The official website includes the original instructional video on how to play.
  • Ticket to Ride, designed by Alan R. Moon and originally published by Days of Wonder in 2004, is a classic train game. Players collect train cards and play coloured sets of these cards to claim routes between cities on a map. This scores points, but the real kicker is at the end of the game, when players reveal the secret route ticket cards they collected at the start; if they connected the cities on the card, they score bonus points, but if they didn’t, they lose that many points. The original uses a map of the USA in the nineteenth century, but there have been many other versions with maps of other countries and regions, and most recently a “legacy” version of the game which adds additional rules as it progresses.
  • Sagrada is a 2017 game by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews. Players are artisans, and draft colourful translucent dice to place on a grid to create a stained glass window. The numbers rolled on the dice indicates the shade of the colour, and players score points based on how they’ve placed their dice and secret bonus objectives. The name comes from the Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, which has been under construction in Barcelona since 1882.
  • The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is actually the sixth podcast to have read and discussed every Discworld novel. The first five, in order, were Radio Morpork, The Death of Podcasts, Wyrd Sisters, The Compleat Discography and Desert Island Discworld. The next one is likely to be the first broader book podcast to do it, Fiction Fans. (You can find indexes of these shows and of their episodes for individual books at our side project, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.)
  • Marc Burrows’ one man show The Magic of Terry Pratchett will play at the Adelaide Fringe Festival from 21 February to 7 March, 6 PM on the main stage at the Arthur Arthouse. Tickets are $28 and there’s a group from local fan club City of Small Gods going on 28 February if you want to meet some fellow fans (and Pratchat listeners). Get all the info and book tickets on the Adelaide Fringe website.

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

#Pratchat81 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 81, “Only Fowls and Horses”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1990 short story “Hollywood Chickens”, and 1972 short story “From the Horse’s Mouth”, with guest Dr Laura Jean McKay.

Iconographic Evidence

We’re hoping to find the illustration from the original version of “Hollywood Chickens” from More Tales From the Forbidden Planet; if you have access to a copy, please let us know!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on Only Fools and Horses, a popular BBC sitcom which originally ran between 1981 and 1991, and continued to show up in the form of Christmas specials until 2006. It starred David Jason (known to Discworld fans for playing Albert and later Rincewind in The Mob’s adaptations for Sky Television) and Nicholas Lyndhurst as “Del Boy” and Rodney Trotter, two half brothers living in south-east London. The show revolves around their various get rich schemes, mostly to do with buying and selling dodgy goods. It holds the record for the highest ratings for a UK sitcom, with 24 million people tuning in to watch the supposed last ever episode in 1996.
  • If The Animals in That Country sounds familiar it may be because it’s won many awards, including the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Fiction, being named a Slate and Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title might also be familiar – it’s named after a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.
  • Thelma & Louise – the regular one, without a dingo – is a beloved 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott (yes, the Alien guy) and written by Callie Khouri. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the titular friends, whose holiday road trip goes horribly wrong…which isn’t a great description of the film, but it’s considered a modern feminist classic for good reason. David and Sarandon were both nominated for Academy Awards, and it was also nominated for several others, winning for Best Screenplay. A musical version is currently in development.
  • Pratchett’s most prolific year was, in fact, 1990 – the same year he wrote “Hollywood Chickens”. That year he published five novels: Diggers (#Pratchat13), Good Omens (#Pratchat15), Wings (#Pratchat20), Eric (#Pratchat7) and Moving Pictures (#Pratchat10).
  • Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-American writer best known for her prolific personal journals, which she started writing at the age of 11.
  • Pratchett actually says that “short stories cost me blood” twice – and in the same book! In A Blink of the Screen, he says this in the author’s note for “Turntables of the Night” (see #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”) and “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”).
  • Pratchett’s meeting with Arthur C. Clarke is detailed in Chapter 3 of A Life With Footnotes. It did indeed happen in the toilet.
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award for the year’s best science fiction novel. It was established in 1987 via a grant from Clarke; the winner is chosen by a panel made up of members of three prominent British science fiction organisations. The Animals in That Country won in 2021; the most recent winner is Martin McInnes for his novel In Ascension.
  • Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, best known for the Young Wizards series of fantasy novels, as well as decades of work on Star Trek as a novelist, screenwriter and more. But that’s just scratching the surface of her work. As Diane was kind enough to point out to us in a comment below (when this note was sadly left very unfinished), she was also a long-time friend of Pratchett’s. We’ve previously linked to Diane’s blog post about the Maggi soup ads incident, as well as this post about it on the Stuffed Crocodile blog; both of them have pictures of the affected books. The previous mention of the soup story was in Eeek Club 2023.
  • The Hollywood Freeway Chickens are absolutely real, though their origins are a mystery. The original colony lives near the exit to Vineland Avenue, and they seem to have been there since 1969 (so a bit earlier than Diane’s story). There’s also a second colony, the “New Freeway Chickens”, a couple of miles away. Several people have come forward over the years claiming to have put them there (via truck accident or otherwise), but none of these stories have been verified. Attempts to remove the chickens have never managed to catch them all, so while we couldn’t find definite confirmation of this, it seems likely that they’re still there now. Listener Natalie was kind enough to ask Diane Duane about it via Tumblr on our behalf; and Diane was a good sport and gave a lovely answer. You can read the original discussion on Tumblr, but in brief: Diane had seen the chickens “often”, and mentioned that “when the subject came up in some convention bar or other, (a) we were in Telling Another Writer About A Cool if Unlikely-Sounding Thing mode—at which time you do not “pull the long bow,” just lay out the facts as known to you—and (b) I knew quite well Terry’d later do his fact-checking and possibly find out more about the story than I knew: which would be fun. …Thus (eventually/accidentally) leaving me with one of the greatest blurb slugs ever seen. 😄”
  • The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-2018) is a classic sci-fi crime drama. It follows two FBI agents, weirdo Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptical Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned weird unsolved cases – the “X-Files” – which usually (but not always) have a supernatural explanation. We’ve previously mentioned the show in #Pratchat35, #Pratchat36, #Prachat42 and #Pratchat69.
  • The Ursula Le Guin story about ants Laura mentions is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, first published in the 1974 anthology Fellowship of the Stars. The phrase being debated in the story is indeed “Up with the Queen!”
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat80 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 80, “Always Believe in Your Golems”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money, with returning guest Stephanie Convery.

Iconographic Evidence

The Count’s first appearance on Sesame Street, from the fourth season in 1972. He was created by long-time Sesame Street writer Norman Stiles, and was the longest running character performed by veteran muppet performer Jerry Nelson. Matt Vogel took over performing the Count in 2013, though he was made much less sinister fairly early on.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a riff on British pop group Spandau Ballet’s hit song “Gold”. It was released in 1983, the fourth single from their third studio album, True, and is probably their most famous song, though at the time the title track from the same album was more popular. ”Gold” was heavily inspired by the film music of John Barry, including his work on many James Bond themes; the original lyrics from the chorus are: “Gold! (Gold) / Always believe in your soul / You’ve got the power to know / You’re indestructible / Always believe in…” It’s been featuring in subsequent pop culture; Ben remembers it from the 1998 comedy Four Men in a Car where a CD gets stuck, looping the line “you’re indestructible” as the car’s occupants try and fail to destroy the car CD’s player.
  • Ben covers some Pratchett news at the end of this episode, but we’re putting the notes about them up front to make them easier to find. (Notes below continue in the usual chronological order.)
  • William Morris (1834 – 1896) was a British artist, poet and novelist. His “terrible utopian novels” include News from Nowhere (1890), in which a member of the Socialist League falls asleep after a meeting and wakes up in a future society built on socialist and Marxist ideals. Morris is also known for his fantasy novels, which were among the first such popular novels to include supernatural elements and were hugely influential, including on J. R. R. Tolkien. These books include The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles; many of these included socialist themes as well.
  • Making Money comes just three books after Going Postal. Moist doesn’t appear in any books in between, but he is mentioned briefly (though not by name) in Thud! He shows up again in the penultimate Discworld novel, Raising Steam, but doesn’t make any cameos in other books.
  • Robert E Howard’s Conan stories are set in the fictional “Hyborian Age” of Earth, estimated to be somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. It’s meant to represent prehistoric Europe and Northern Africa, and thus Cimmeria is the ancient home of Celtic peoples, but it’s based on ahistorical stereotypes and is functionally a collection of fantasy analogues for modern nations. The real Cimmeria was an ancient “micro continent” that was originally part of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. It became detached around 250 million years ago and moved north as part of continental drift, eventually colliding with and becoming part of Eurasia around 150 million years ago. It now forms part of the Middle East and western and south-eastern Asia.
  • “WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN” is from a heartbreaking scene towards the end of Feet of Clay, and the words are from Dorfl.
  • Squashing bread does not make it sweeter, but chewing on it does. The missing ingredient is saliva, which begins the process of breaking down the complex carbohydrates in the bread into sugars.
  • The compulsive need to count is known as “arithmomania”, and is a feature of European vampire lore. It was usually other kinds of grains, rather than rice, though this may also be the reason for throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off the Devil – he would be compelled to stop and count every grain.
  • The jiāngshī (殭屍) or Chinese hopping vampire is a form of undead from Chinese folklore, similar in some ways to both vampires and zombies. There are many varied accounts of their powers, limitations and vulnerabilities, but they don’t seem to have to count grains of rice – instead, one method for stopping them is through a ball of sticky rice at them which will draw out the evil in their soul. They have inspired an entire genre of films, most famously the Mr Vampire comedy horror movies made in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. These popularised the hopping version of jiāngshī, gave them a standard look (traditional mandarin robes from the Qing dynasty), and established some common ways to deal with them (e.g. placing a spell written on a piece of paper on their forehead) in much the same way as early vampire films solidified European vampire lore.
  • Bram Stoker (1847-1912) drew on various bits of vampire folklore when creating Dracula, but he also incorporated real life science, beliefs about disease, recent events, and other unrelated supernatural stories. The most prominent vampire-adjacent belief at the time was that contagious diseases were caused by corpses which still contained blood in the heart. This led especially poor folk in rural areas to dig up corpses and destroy them to try and halt the spread of illness, a practice which seems to have directly inspired parts of the novel. Stoker wrote fifteen novels, the second most famous being his last, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), another horror story incorporating various elements from folklore.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat79 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 79, “Unalive from Überwald”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2002 short story “Death and What Comes Next”, with returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts and new guest Karen J Carlisle.

Iconographic Evidence

If you also took photos of us at the convention, please get in touch – we’d love to see them and add a few here!

You can also find photos of the convention at the official website.

A photo of Ben and Liz, in costume as Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig, attempting to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo.
Ben and Liz attempted to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo, with costume and iconographic assistance from Danny Sag.
A photo of a small piece of white paper on a green surface. Handwriting in black pen reads: “dead and not dead” Schrödinger’s cat What if the cat is Greebo? Next to the writing is drawn a small cartoon cat with prominent whiskers and an eye patch.
The audience question with the very cute illustration of Greebo!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme for Nullus Anxietas IX, “Come Alive in Überwald”, but since we were talking mostly about Death, “Live from Überwald” didn’t seem quite right.
  • Nullus Anxietas IX is, as you probably know, the ninth bi-annual Australian Discworld convention. As mentioned at the end of the episode, the next convention will be in Sydney in 2026, and you can already get a supporting membership for the next convention. For details, plus information on past conventions and Discworld fan clubs across Australia, head to ausdwcon.org.
  • Our previous live shows are:
  • Liz mentions two of her short stories:
    • The story about women turning into cleaning equipment is “Call Him Al”. You can read it in Meanjin, where it was published in 2020.
    • The story about an immigrant splitting into two people is “One’s Company”, originally published in the anthology Best Australian Stories 2017. It was published online at InterSastra in an Indonesian translation (“Cukup Sendiri”) by Nicolaus Gogor Seta Dewa; the original English version is also available there.
  • “Pantsers and Plotters” are widespread terms for “the two types” of writers, embraced to varying degrees by writing communities and individuals. The classification is based on whether a writer works out a plot in advance (a plotter), or writes by the seat of their pants (a pantser), making it up as they go along. It’s not entirely clear where these terms originated, but these days some writers refer to themselves as “plantsers” (a combination of the two), and other terms exist for roughly the same ideas. For example, in 2011 George R. R. Martin used the terms architect (similar to a plotter) and gardener (a variation on pantser in which the emphasis is on the weeding, i.e. editing).
  • Tansy’s stories that get mentioned include:
    • Musketeer Space, the gender-swapped Three Musketeers in space;
    • Teacup Magic, the Regency-inspired fantasy mystery series (we’ve linked to the collection);
    • We don’t think Tansy has written “Beauty and the Beast with cyborgs”, but she has written Curse of Bronze, a novella which riffs on Beauty and the Beast. It’s available for free as an ebook via BookFunnel (you’ll need to sign up to Tansy’s mailing list), or in audio form on her podcast Sheep Might Fly.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat78 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 78, “One Step Beyond”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s final collaboration with Stephen Baxter, 2016’s The Long Cosmos, with returning guests Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is from the song “One Step Beyond”, originally by Jamaican artist Prince Buster, who released it as a B-side on his single “Al Capone” in 1964. Coincidentally the version of the original we could find on YouTube features footage of exactly the kind of exoticised “Egyptian” dancing we imagined Fred and Nobby doing in our episode about Jingo. (We don’t necessarily recommend listening to all Prince Buster’s back catalogue; the music is great, but some of the lyrics are misogynist at best.) In the UK and Australia, ”One Step Beyond” is much better known via the cover by Madness, a ska band from Camden who also took their name and other early covers from Prince Buster. The song was the title track on Madness’ first studio album, One Step Beyond (1979), and their second hit single.
  • We’ve previously discussed the The Long Earth:
  • The Long Earth timeline only gets a bit longer in this book; here’s an updated (and simplified) list of major events to help you keep it all straight:
    • 1848-1895 – the adventures of Joshua’s ancestor, natural stepper Luis Valienté, culminating in “the Fund”, an organisation that bribes steppers to interbreed. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2001 – Freddie Burdon is given Maria Valienté’s details by The Fund. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2002 – Maria, now 15, gives birth to Joshua, leaving him briefly alone on a stepwise Earth. (The Long Earth)
    • 2015 – “Step Day” – humanity at large learns of the Long Earth. (The Long Earth)
    • 2026 – The Green family and others establish Reboot on Earth West 101,754. (The Long Earth)
    • 2029 – Monica Jansson investigates Bettany Diamond, the “Damaged Woman” who sees into stepwise Earths. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2030 – Lobsang and Joshua go on “The Journey” and meet Sally Linsay; they also find the Cueball Earth. Lobsang’s “ambulant unit” is left behind with First Person Singular on the far side of The Gap. Joshua (M28) meets Helen (F17). Rod Green delivers the suitcase nuke to Datum Madison. (The Long Earth)
    • 2031 – Joshua and Helen get married. (before The Long War)
    • 2036 – Cassie Poulson is the first human to encounter the “silver beetles” in New Springfield on Earth West 1,217,756. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2038 – After three years of distributing copies of the Complete Works to Long Earth communities, Johnny Shakespeare’s matter printer makes a mutant copy of itself on Earth West 31,415 which multiplies until the world has to be evacuated. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2040 – Maggie’s mission captaining The Benjamin Franklin. Roberta’s trip with the Chinese East Twenty Million mission. War is avoided between the United States and Valhalla. Joshua loses his hand after being captured by the Beagles. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. Monica Jansson dies. (The Long War) Stan Berg is born. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2045 – Maggie’s mission as captain of the Neil Armstrong II, and Sally’s trip to Mars with her father Willis and Frank Wood. Frank dies on Mars. Joshua and Sally help the Next escape from military prison, and Joshua successfully talks Maggie out of blowing them up; they leave to establish the Grange, and Lobsang destroys Happy Landings with a meteorite. (The Long Mars) Lobsang “dies” in late fall; his funeral is in December. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2052 – Nikos is the first confirmed human to step “North” when he finds the Gallery and the silver beetles on New Springfield. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2054 – “George”, Agnes and their adopted son Ben settle in New Springfield. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2056 – Agnes realises something is wrong with the world and discovers the beetles. Stan is approached by Roberta Golding to join the Next in the Grange and declines. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2058 – Lobsang and Joshua investigate Earth West 1,217,756 and uncover the beetles’ plans. Six months later in Fall, Joshua finds Sally and they retrieve the old Lobsang from Earth West 174,827,918, the home of the Traversers. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2059 – Early in the year, Stan, “George” and Sally “cauterise” Earth West 1,217,756 just before it is destroyed by the beetles.
    • 2067 – Helen Green dies and is buried in Datum Madison. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2070 – The Invitation is heard by humans, the Next, the trolls and many others. Joshua goes on his ill-fated sabbatical, is rescued by Sancho, and the pair rescue Rod from the Yggdrasil world. Meanwhile Nelson meets his son and grandson, who is lost when Second Person Singular steps away. The Next start the project to build the Thinker. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2071 – The Thinker nears completion and Maggie, Joshua, the new Lobsang, Sancho and friends take three big steps North. (The Long Cosmos)
  • Stella Welch is not a new character; she appears briefly in The Long Utopia, held up as one of the brightest “pre-Emergence” Next in the Grange. She is also one of the Next who answers Lobsang’s call for help about New Springfield, and reveals the plan to recruit Stan to seal off that Earth.
  • Ben refers to “Martin” from the Humble; this is due to a typo in his notes. The character is actually Marvin Lovelace, who (as Liz rightly remembered in a bit cut for time) is one of the Next who appeared in The Long Utopia. In that book he’s a gambler, an undercover agent for the Next who found Stan Berg, and later answers Lobsang’s call for help alongside Stella. He seems briefly conflicted about Stan’s fate.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat77 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 77, “How to Get Below in Advertising”, discussing the 1963 short story “The Hades Business” with guest Lucas Testro.

Iconographic Evidence

The specific Bob Newhart advertising sketch that Lucas was thinking of is this one about Abraham Lincoln. (See also the further note about Bob Newhart below.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the 1989 British black comedy film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard E Grant and written and directed by Bruce Robinson (both of Withnail and I fame).
  • You can find a digital copy of the August 1963 issue of Science Fantasy magazine at the Internet Archive here.
  • The Unfriendly Future was published in October 1965 by Four Square Books, edited by Tom Baordman, Jr. (As Ben guessed, Pratchett was indeed 17 at the time.) The book included the following stories, mostly previously published in John Carnell’s magazines:
    • Russkies Go Home!, a 1960 novelette by Mack Reynolds
    • “The Food Goes in the Top”, a 1961 short story by Will Mohler (as Will Worthington)
    • Danger: Religion!, a 1962 novella by Brian W. Aldiss
    • “Rescue Operation”, a 1964 short story by Harry Harrison
    • “The Hades Business”, a 1963 short story by Terry Pratchett
    • The Seed of Violence, a 1958 novelette by Jay Williams
  • Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is best known as the author of the fantasy novel Titus Groan and its sequels, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, usually referred to as the Gormenghast series. Peake intended to write many more books in this series, but only completed the three novels and a novella, Boy in Darkness, before he died from Parkinson’s Disease. Titus Alone was republished in 2007 in a new version reconstructed from his handwritten manuscript, the original version having errors produced from misreadings of the manuscript. Peake was also a poet, playwright and illustrator, and illustrated editions of many books including his own, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. If you want to know more, as of April 2025 our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret are discussing the Gormenghast books during the first year of their post-Pratchett second season.
  • Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a prolific British science fiction writer best known for his Helliconia trilogy of novels (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, published between 1982 and 1985) which chronicle the history of a civilisation on an otherwise Earth-like planet with incredibly long seasons. He also wrote the 1969 short story “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” which decades later inspired the Stanley Kubrick/Stephen Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like Pratchett, his first published story was published by John Carnell in Science Fantasy, 1958’s “Criminal Record”, though he was considerably older, having spent his younger years in the army and working as a bookseller and editor. He was was a long-time collaborator with Harry Harrison, and the two were part of the “British New Wave” of science fiction. As related in A Life With Footnotes, Terry and his mate Dave met Brian Aldiss (and Harrison) at the 1965 Eastercon in Birmingham.
  • We previously mentioned Harry Harrison (1925-2012) in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”. Harrison was an American science fiction author best known for his character the “Stainless Steel Rat”, an interplanetary con man and rogue who first appeared in an eponymous novel in 1957. He also wrote the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted (very loosely) into the film Soylent Green in 1973. (If you know one thing about the film, it’s not in the novel.) Pratchett is known to have been a fan of Harrison’s work, considering Bill, the Galactic Hero to be the funniest science fiction novel ever written over The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which he also rated, to be clear), considering that the former novel wasn’t a big hit because not enough readers were familiar with the source material being parodied. He also met Harrison at science fiction conventions as a teenager.
  • “Stagger soup” doesn’t seem to be a Pratchett invention, but existing slang for whiskey – though most sources we could find say it’s from North America (some say it’s still in use in Canada), perhaps dating from the prohibition era. Our guess would be that Pratchett found it through American sci-fi writing. “Joy-juice” has similarly American origins, perhaps inspired by “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, a fictional beverage from the comic strip Li’l Abner, and which was later turned into a real life soft drink by the Monarch Beverage Company in 1965.
  • The Good Place is one of Ben’s favourite sictoms, following Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell), a terrible, selfish young woman from Arizona who dies and ends up in “The Good Place”, a heaven-like afterlife. Eleanor quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake, and convinces her supposed soul mate, ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to help her learn to be a better person so she can belong there. Over it’s four short seasons the show evolves a lot and has many twists and turns it’s more fun to discover yourself, but it is a plot point in later episodes that there are many more people in The Bad Place than The Good Place.
  • Donald Cotton (1928-1999), the subject of Lucas’ documentary Myth Maker: The Legend of Donald Cotton, was a British writer for radio, television and stage. He is best known for the early Doctor Who stories he wrote which took the show in a more comedic direction: “The Myth Makers”, in which the Doctor travels to the Trojan war, and “The Gunfighters”, in which he gets mixed up in the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He’d likely have written more, but the new producers of the show decided not to do so many historical episodes. He also helped create the television program Adam Adamant Lives!, a later project of Doctor Who co-creators Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman.
  • Bedazzled is a 1967 film written by Peter Cook in which George Spiggot (played by Cook), a man claiming to be the Devil, offers meek and depressed cook Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) seven wishes. None of them, of course, go as planned – it’s more or less a parody of Faust. While there’s some very witty and clever stuff in there, it should also be said that the entire premise revolves around Moon wanting to date a waitress (played by Eleanor Bron) at the hamburger place where he works, and it has some very 1967 ideas which don’t really stand up today. A 2000 remake, also titled Bedazzled and directed and co-written by Ghostbusters’ Harold Ramis, starred Brendan Fraser as Elliott Richards, an equivalent to Stanley Moon who pines for a woman he works with at a computer company. Elizabeth Hurley played The Devil, who doesn’t go by an alias.
  • Bob Newhart (born 1929) is an American comedian who found fame in 1960 when his album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to reach number one in the American charts (it also reached number two in the UK). The advertising sketch mentioned by Lucas is “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” from that album, and in a 2005 interview Newhart claimed it was his own favourite. Newhart went on to a successful screen career, with his own sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990), and subsequent appearances in films and other shows, including the recurring role of “Professor Proton” in The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon.
  • Bewitched (1964-1972) is an American fantasy sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch who against the wishes and advice of her mother and community, marries a “mortal” man, Darrin Stephens (originally Dick York; he was replaced by Dick Sargent for the last three seasons due to illness). The series was created by comedy writer Sol Saks, based in part on the 1942 film I Married a Witch. Like the ad man in Newhart’s sketch, Darrin works on Madison Avenue for the fictional firm of McMann and Tate, his boss being one of the named partners, Larry Tate.
  • We get into a bit of business jargon familiar to Australian freelancers here, so let us explain. A sole trader – not a “soul trader”, though we considered that as a title for this episode – is a business classification used in Australia. It’s basically a one-person company, and costs very little to set up; the downside is that there’s no limited liability as there is in other structures. All Australian businesses require an Australian Business Number, or ABN, to identify them. GST is the Australian Goods and Services Tax, a 10% value-added tax introduced in 2000 on most goods and services sold in Australia. Companies (including sole traders) with revenue of more than $75,000 a year are required to register for GST, which means that they have to charge GST to their customers and pay that to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), but can also claim the GST they pay on good and services bought to run the business as a credit, reducing the GST payment they make to the ATO.
  • The story about Pratchett almost buying a DeLorean appears in chapter 15 of A Life With Footnotes.
  • Geryon was a giant in classical mythology said to have three heads. The name was later used by Dante in his Inferno as the name of greater demon, the Monster of Fraud, who is more like a dragon; Dante and Virgil ride on its back into the eighth circle, where those who committed fraud in life are found.
  • A “noodle incident” is a comedy fiction trope in which a past incident is referred to by characters but never explained. It takes its name from an example in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which the characters often refer to “the noodle incident” but writer Bill Watterson decided to never explain it since the readers’ imagination will always be better than than anything he could come up with. Pratchett is fond of them, the major Discworld example being what happened to Mr Hong’s restaurant, The Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar, which seemingly disappeared from Ankh-Morpork after being build on an old Temple of Dagon.
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British public intellectual best known as a philosopher and political activist. A lifelong pacifist, Russell opposed Britain’s participation in the First World War, leading to him being convicted under wartime censorship acts in 1916. He was fined £100 and when he refused to pay, hoping to be sent to prison to further attention for the cause, his books were siezed and sold at auction; most were bought by his friends and returned to him, some stamped as confiscated by the police. He was subsequently dismissed from his position at Trinity College London, though this was an unpopular decision and he was reinstated in 1919. He generally regarded religion as a form of superstition and an impediment to moral and social progress, describing himself as an agnostic or atheist, publishing an essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” in 1927. His most famous work is Principia Mathematica, a book laying out the principles of mathematical and symbolic logic, written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. It was a follow up to Russell’s earlier 1903 work The Principles of Mathematics. His other famous works include the essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and the books Power: A New Social Analysis and A History of Western Philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
  • Satan in the Suburbs was Bertrand Russell’s first work of fiction, published in 1953 – rather earlier than Ben remembered. It collected three novelettes, Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here, The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X (which had been previously published anonymously) and The Infra-Redioscope, plus two short stories, “The Guardians of Parnassus” and “Benefit of Clergy”. The book was apparently well-received at the time, but modern readers aren’t so kind. The titular story is more or less a variant on “The Monkey’s Paw”, in which four ordinary people respond to a plaque on the suburban house of the mysterious Dr Mallako, and don’t get what they bargained for. Russell’s journey to fiction writing was sort of opposite to Pratchett’s, coming near the end of his life – he was 80 when he wrote these stories.
  • Hades is a hit videogame developed by Supergiant Games, previously best known for their breakout hit Bastion. It’s a rogue-like game, meaning the player enters a series of randomised levels of increasing difficulty and likely dies before reaching the end, which sends them back to the start; but they improve in skill each time, making them able to get further on subsequent attempts. The player character is Zagreus, a reasonably obscure figure from Greek mythology who in some stories is the sone of Zeus, and in others the son of Hades. In the game he is the latter, and journeys through the Underworld in an attempt to find out how and why his mother, Persephone, has left. In the game, Cerberus is seen having a rest next to the desk of Hades where he receives new souls; the player is able to speak to him and pat and scratch his heads. A sequel, Hades II, is in early access; the player is no longer Zagreus, but instead his sister Melinoë, another character who is said to have been fathered by Zeus.
  • Heck is a 2013 graphic novel by Eisner Award-nominated American comic creator Zander Cannon, published by Top Shelf Comix. It collects the original comic which first appeared in Top Shelf’s digital magazine Double Barrel. In the novel, protagonist Hector “Heck” Hammarskjöld inherits his estranged father’s house and discovers a portal to the Underworld in the basement. He initially uses it to settle disputes around wills by contacting the souls of the dead, but eventually gets drawn into a bigger adventure that sees him travel through the Circles of Hell. Cannon’s most recent series is Kaijumax for Oni Press, about a prison for giant monsters, published in six volumes between 2015 and 2022.
  • We discussed Faust Eric way back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”, with guest Georgina Chadderton.
  • We discussed Good Omens (the novel) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World (and I feel Nice and Accurate)”, with guests Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray.
  • The traditional marketing mix was introduced by American marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The original version, itself an evolution of earlier ideas, was “the Four Ps of Marketing”: product, price, place and promotion. It was extended in 1981 by Booms and Bitner into the “Seven Ps”, adding not just “people” but “process” and “physical evidence”. Modern usage seems to vary with anything between four and seven “P”s, depending on who you ask and what industry is involved.
  • Matt Damon’s 2021 crypto ad, “Fortune Favours the Brave”, featured the actor walking between exhibits of supposedly great human endeavour and exhorting the viewer to be bold…and invest in cryptocurrency using the exchange crypto.com. Damon later said he only did it to support the charity water.org, which tries to improve access to safe drinking water to communities worldwide. American actor (and ex-economist) Ben McKenzie, who wrote the book Easy Money about the crypto fad, gave his highly critical opinion about the ad (and what it was trying to sell) in many places, including a January 2022 episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD.
  • The “comma, for the use of” jokes are primarily seen in Men at Arms (as discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”) when Fred Colon is handing out equipment to the new recruits, though it returns as a callback once or twice.
  • Fallout: New Vegas is the sixth game in the satirical post-apocalyptic Fallout series. The games are set in the wastelands of a future America, decimated by a nuclear war with China in 2077, though the pre-War America of the games was a 1950s retro-futuristic vision of nuclear-powered cars and household robots. The first couple of games were made in the late 1990s by Black Isle Studios (originally under a different name), but following a couple of spin-off games, the license for the franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks, makers of the hugely successful Elder Scrolls series of fantasy roleplaying games. They made Fallout 3 in 2008, the first game to have a modern first person perspective, but some fans thought it lost too much of the satirical tone of the originals. Obsidian Entertainment, another studio which included developers who’d worked on earlier Fallout games, pitched an idea for another game using the Fallout engine set in a different part of the game’s America; it was accepted and released in 2010 as Fallout: New Vegas. In the game, the player is a Courier given the job of delivering a special poker chip to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas, but they are waylaid by a gangster working with the Great Khans, a local tribe of raiders, who steal the chip, shoot the character and leave them for dead. They survive and try to find the chip and complete the job, along the way altering the future of the entire Mojave Wasteland, which is being fought over by the Khans, the New California Republic, and the mysterious Mr House, who controls New Vegas itself.
  • Monty Python, as we’re sure you probably know, were a British comedy group formed in 1969, best known for their television sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus which ran from 1969 to 1974, and their films, which most relevantly here include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), in which God appears to King Arthur as a cut-out animation of bearded man in a cloud, created like all the Python animations by Terry Gilliam. Their next film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), follows the mis-adventures of a man born at the same time as Jesus and mistaken for a messiah; God does not appear, though Jesus is seen from a distance giving the Sermon on the Mount.
  • Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) is an overtly patriotic American action film about an alien invasion starring an ensemble cast including Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. When the immense alien saucers arrive in Earth’s atmosphere (launched from an even bigger mothership in high orbit), they create clouds to shield themselves from view.
  • Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999) is a fantasy film in which two exiled angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) plan to re-enter Heaven by exploiting an open offer of indulgence from an American Cardinal. Early on in the film, protagonist Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) is visited by Metatron (Alan Rickman), a Seraphim who is the Voice of God. As he explains: ‘Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God’s true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.’
  • Pandæmonium – not Pandæmomium, as Ben mis-speaks it here – is the name invented for the capital city of Hell by British poet John Milton in his famous 1667 epic Paradise Lost. It draws on Greek, and translates roughly as “place of all demons”.
  • The “sand ropes” stories can be found in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale index as type 1174, “Deceiving the Devil with a Rope of Sand”. Examples can be found in Scotland, England, Ireland and Germany. Some of the stories star Michael Scot, a thirteenth century mathematician and astrologer.
  • The issue of Science Fantasy in which the story first appeared was volume 20, number 60, published in August 1963. A digital version of the issue is available via the Internet Archive; the link will take you to the first page of “The Hades Business”.
  • Janet is one of the major characters of The Good Place, played by D’Arcy Carden. While she frequently has to remind the human characters that she is “not a robot” and “not a girl”, Janet is the afterlife equivalent of a computer interface, able to access all knowledge and providing the means for Architects of the afterlife to create the Neighbourhoods in which human souls live out existence. Carden also plays other versions of Janet, including Bad Janet (the Bad Place’s ruder equivalent), and Neutral Janet (the very bland version who works in the “Accounting Department” responsible for deciding who goes where after death).
  • Benidorm isn’t the kind of place Ben is thinking of – it’s not even in the UK! It’s a municipality on the southeastern coast of Spain. It became a major tourist destination in the 1980s, has three world-renowned beaches, and has a famous hotel which is one of the tallest buildings in Spain. There’s also a popular British sitcom set there, also called Benidorm, which ran on ITV from 2007 to 2018. It follows a large ensemble cast of British holidaymakers from various social classes who make repeat visits to an all-inclusive holiday resort in Benidorm, though the cast changed significantly over the ten series.
  • Skegness is more the kind of place Ben is talking about. Located on the Lincolnshire coast on the East of Britain, Skegness was formerly one of the most popular holiday resort towns in the UK, but went into decline from the 1970s as overseas holidays became cheaper. It’s the home of the original Butlin’s holiday camp, now known as Butlins Skegness, and one of only three still in operation, the rest having closed in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a bit fancier than our description makes it sound, with pools and activities and entertainment, and a range of different types of accomodation.
  • Better Than a Poke in the Eye is the British fantasy newsletter formerly known as Discworld Monthly. Its creators, Jason and Rachel, appeared in our special Discworld anniversary episode, “How Did Discworld Get to 40?” The Llamedos Holiday Camp now runs every two years, with the next one in 2026, themed as “The Llamedos Hogs Ball 2026”.
  • The Prisoner is a 1967 television series created by Irish actor Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009), best known at the time for starring as spy John Dake in the earlier spy series Danger Man. Danger Man initially only lasted one season in 1960, and afterwards McGoohan was offered the role of James Bond, and Simon Templar in The Saint; he turned both down on moral grounds, mostly because as a Catholic he objected to those characters’ promiscuity (he famously insisted on no kissing in Danger Man). The popularity of Bond led to a Danger Man revival in 1964 that made McGoohan the highest-paid television actor in the UK. The show was a hit in the UK and America, where it was re-titled Secret Agent and had the popular theme song “Secret Agent Man”. It inspired various copycats and spoofs, including the cartoon Danger Mouse. McGoohan’s star power also got him more control over the show, and when he was announced he was quitting, was able to negotiate to make a new series of his own devising: The Prisoner. The premise was that a spy angrily quits his job, but after leaving the agency’s office is abducted and taken to a weird, almost surreal holiday camp known as “The Village”, where everyone is referred to only by number – the protagonist is “Number Six”. The secret controllers of the camp use all kinds of bizarre gambits to try and find out why Number Six quit the agency, but he refuses to tell them, and makes repeated attempts to escape and discover who is in charge – the mysterious and never seen Number One. Each episode features a different Number Two, who acts on behalf of Number One. Though originally conceived as a mini-series of just seven episodes, The Prisoner was extended to seventeen episodes, broadcast in 1967 and 1968. It got behind schedule, though, and a final two colour episodes of Danger Man (shown in the US as a telemovie) were broadcast in the first two weeks of its timeslot, instead of after the finale as originally planned. The finale is…well, it’s a whole other discussion, but let’s just say opinion is fairly sharply divided on the ending. But the show itself is otherwise seen as something of a weird masterpiece, and Ben highly recommends you check out some of the best episodes.

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

#EeekClub2024 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2024“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

  • If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
  • This is our fourth Eeek Club special; the previous ones are Eeek Club 2021, Eeek Club 2022 and Eeek Club 2023.
  • “Ramen hacks” are things you can add into your bowl of traditional Japanese noodle soup to make it even more delicious. (Not a lot of them are vegetarian, so Ben has given them a miss.) If you want to find some, you could look up the hashtag #ramenhacks on TikTok or Instagram, search YouTube, or do a web search, which will find a fair number of listicles.
  • Find out all the details about the Australian Discworld Convention (12-14 July 2024 in Adelaide) at their website, ausdwcon.org.
  • “Mad March” is the name given in Adelaide to the period of the year usually starting in late February and running through March when nearly all of their big cultural events occur: the Adelaide Fringe Festival (the second largest fringe arts festival in the world!), the Adelaide Festival, Womadelaide, the Clipsal 500 car race, and in some years even South Australia’s major horse race and a state election. It used to be not much else of note would happen there during the rest of the year, but as Liz mentions that’s no longer the case.
  • Maid Marian and Her Merry Men was a sitcom pitched at kids created by Tony Robinson. It spoofed the Robin Hood myth by having Robin be a cowardly tailor mistaken for a rebel leader, when actually Marian is the brains behind the outfit. We’ve mentioned it before, though not for a long time – it was way back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”, and #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders”. The episode Ben is thinking of here is “They Came From Outer Space” from the show’s third series in 1993. (Fun fact: Ben wrote the first – and for a long time only – website dedicated to the show way back in around 1994, and even corresponded with a couple of the writers and actors on the show. A lot of the information on modern Marian sites is plag- well, copied from his site, which no longer exists except in the Internet Archive.)
  • The “Keep your secrets, Gandalf” meme is from the scene where Frodo meets Gandalf as he arrives in the Shire at the start of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.
  • We mention a few TV shows:
    • The Worst Witch was originally a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Jill Murphy, the first of which was published in 1974. It chronicles the adventures of Mildred Hubble, a student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Young Witches; Mildred’s clumsiness gets her into all sorts of trouble and earns her the titular epithet. It’s actually been two different television series, one fairly low budget one in 1998 which was so popular it had two spin-offs, and a newer one in 2017. There was also a stage musical in 2018!
    • Dead Boy Detectives is on Netflix, and is based on characters created by Neil Gaiman for the Sandman comics, who later went on to star in more adventures in comics and appear briefly in the Doom Patrol television series before getting their own show. The titular dead boys are a pair of ghosts who solve supernatural crimes while hiding out from Death so they can stay together. The first season was released ion 25 April 2024.
    • Wednesday is also on Netflix. Created by Tim Burton, it’s a new version of The Addams Family focussed on Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega. After being expelled from a regular high school, Wednesday is sent to the much creepier Nevermore Academy. A second season is coming, probably in 2025.
    • The White Lotus is a black comedy anthology series on HBO. Each season takes place at a different hotel run by the fictional White Lotus chain. The third season is coming in 2025.

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

#Pratchat76 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 76, “Real Men Don’t Drink…Decaf”, discussing the 2003 standalone Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment with guest Freya Daly Sadgrove.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s “how is prangent formed”, the most famous YouTube compilation of misspelled Yahoo Answers questions about being pregnant, from 21 October 2016. While it’s mostly a bit of fun, it’s important to remember these were all asked by real people who had real fears and worries, just no way to edit their hastily (and perhaps secretly) typed questions. The US has a lot to answer for when it comes to sex (and indeed general) education…

Here’s that Traffic Accident Commission ad we mentioned, but please be warned, it’s pretty intense (though not gory).

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a bit of a mash-up of two ideas: first, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, the 1982 book by Bruce Feirstein satirising American ideas of masculinity (and which we last mentioned in our episode about The Unadulterated Cat, “The Cat in the Prat”). The second is another riff on the classic vampire line “I don’t drink…wine”, originally from the 1931 film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi (though the original line was “I never drink…wine”). Just to be clear: we don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking decaf, or believe in the idea of a “real man”. You’re a man if you think you are; that’s how gender works.
  • “Let’s Get Down to Business” is the first line of the song “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. Mulan is an adaptation of a Chinese folk story from around the 4th to 6th centuries BCE about Hua Mulan, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fulfil her family’s conscription obligations, saving her father from being forced to join the army. She goes on to win great battles and achieve great fame. In the film, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is sung by Mulan’s Captain, Li Shang (played by BD Wong, but sung by Donny Osmond!), during a training montage for Mulan and her fellow fresh recruits.
  • Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011) was a British fantasy children’s author. As one of Liz’s other favourite authors, we’ve mentioned her a lot – and one of these days we’ll do an episode or more about her books. Her most famous works include the Chrestomanci series about magical parallel universes, and Howl’s Moving Castle. The titular Howl is a mighty wizard, but the protagonist of the story is Sophie, the eldest daughter of a hat shop owner, who is cursed with old age by the Witch of the Wastes. Sophie gets a job as a cleaner for the wizard Howl, and makes a bargain with his fire demon, Calcifer, that he will restore her youth if she can free him from his contract to the wizard. It was very succesfully (if very loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004.
  • The panel featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1988. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”, and we mentioned it more recently in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”). It was chaired by Neil Gaiman and also features John Harrison and Geoff Ryman.
  • You can read the full text of the Daily Express review of Monstrous Regiment on Colin Smythe’s web page for the book. It opens with: “Not so long ago in a pub far, far, away Terry Pratchett announced that he had discovered an interesting fact. In the American Civil War more than 300 women had enlisted in the army dressed as men. There may have been more. These were just one ones who told people about it afterwards.”
  • Questionable Content (QC for short) is a long-running webcomic written and illustrated by American-Canadian cartoonist Jeph Jacques. It started in 2003, and is a slice-of-life story about indie rock fan Martin Reed and friends, set in a slightly futuristic world where artificial intelligence and advanced cybernetics are commonplace. At the time of writing it’s had more than 5,200 instalments! Elliot is a character introduced in 2011, an employee at a bakery first visited by Martin in Comic 1,845. Like Paul Perks, he’s a big but gentle man.
  • We previously met the small-but-officious Nuggan in the “illustrated Discworld fable” The Last Hero, as discussed in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • For the curious, you can find a list of Abominations Unto Nuggan mentioned in this book (and elsewhere – mainly The Last Hero and The Compleat Discworld Atlas) at the L-Space Wiki.
  • For reference, the members of the Monstrous Regiment are:
    • Lieutenant Blouse (no first name given; later promoted to much higher rank)
    • Sergeant Jack Jackrum (no other name given; later promoted to Sergeant Major)
    • Corporal Strappi (later revealed to (probably?) be a Captain and a “political”)
    • Private Oliver “Ozzer” Perks (Polly; later promoted to Sergeant)
    • Private Maladicta (Maladict)
    • Private Carborundum (Jade)
    • Private Igor (Igorina)
    • Private “Tonker” Halter (Magda)
    • Private “Shufti” Manickle (Betty)
    • Private “Wazzer” Goom (Alice)
    • Private “Lofty” Tewt (Tilda)
  • Ben gives a short account of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women in the footnote, but if you want to read it, the full text is available via Project Goodmountain – er, Gutenberg.
  • We first heard about Terry Pratchett’s 2014 interview at the Wheeler Centre during the recording of #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“ – our guest, Michael Williams, was director of the Centre at the time, and was the interviewer for the event. His story about making a faux pas – and Terry’s reaction – are included in the third episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. The full discussion, titled “Imagination, Not Intelligence, Made Us Human”, is available via YouTube. There’s a lot of good stuff in it! Pratchett mentions researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”; this is around the 31:30 mark.
  • “Sweet Polly Oliver” (also known as “Pretty Polly Oliver”) is song #367 in the Roud folk song index. It comes from around 1840 or earlier, and the first lines are “As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed / A sudden strange fancy came into her head.” As Liz mentions, in the song Polly is following her lover, whom she eventually finds promoted to Captain and wounded; the doctors give up on him, but she nurses him back to health and they get married.
  • There are many other references to real protest and folk songs in the book; here are some of the folk songs:
    • “The World Turned Upside Down” – a British protest song from the 1640s, railing against restrictions placed on the celebration of Christmas by the British Parliament. A long-standing but unlikely story is that it was played by the British army band when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans after the Battle of Yorktown, hence the Hamilton song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”. (Usually the band would play a song from the victor’s nation, but supposedly George Washington refused this tradition and told them to play a British song.)
    • “The Devil Shall Be My Sergeant” – a reference to “The Rogue’s March”, a song which was once traditionally played when drumming a disgraced solider out of the army. It had various sets of unofficial lyrics, many of which included the line “the Divil shall be me sergeant”. When it was no longer used officially by armies, it was played as “rough music” – yes, that was a thing on Roundworld, both in a similar sense as in I Shall Wear Midnight (see #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No Eyes is Back”), and more literally as a tune to shame followers of unpopular causes.
    • “Johnny Has Gone for a Solider” – an Irish folk song popular during the American Revolutionary War.
    • “The Girl I Left Behind Me” – Roud index #262, also known as “The Girl I Left Behind”. This is an English folk song from Elizabethan times, traditionally sung when soldiers marched off to war or a naval vessel set sail. It’s also the source of the lyric “Her golden hair in ringlets fair” which Igor quotes when coming up with excuses for Polly to have her old hair in her bag.
    • “Lisbon” or “William and Nancy” or “William and Polly” – #551 in the Roud index, this is possibly the song that Jackrum mentions when explaining the “Cheesemongers” nickname, which begins with the line “’Twas on a Monday morning, all in the month of May”. It’s sung by a sailor, William, who’s about to sail for Lisbon, and is leaving his pregnant lover, Nancy or Polly, behind. Nancy writes back to him saying she’ll disguise herself as a man so she can sail with him and save him from the terrors of the navy. The rest of the song doesn’t really match Jackrum’s description, which mashes up a whole lot of different bawdy folk tunes. There’s also “Dashing Away With the Smoothing Iron”, #869 in the Roud index, which begins with the first half of the line; it’s about a man repeatedly admiring a woman while she’s doing her ironing, and was the inspiration for Flanders and Swann’s “The Gas-Man Cometh”.
  • We read The Last Continent way back in 2020 in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”. The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld book, published in 1998, nine books and four years and four months before Monstrous Regiment. (Pratchett was still publishing two books a year at the time.)
  • Traditionally, tailors do indeed ask if gentlemen “dress to the left or right”, but stories conflict over whether this is because they intend to make said gentleman’s trousers more roomy on that side, or whether they just ask to avoid any awkward moments while taking inside leg measurements.
  • There have been many Roundworld equivalents of the Nugganite Working Girl Schools; some of the most infamous were the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. These were filled with so-called “fallen women” – mostly, but not exclusively, sex workers and pregnant girls – who were forced to work for free and suffered abuse at the hands of the staff.
  • Indulgences are a practice of the Catholic church. Ben is referring to “full indulgence”, a complete forgiveness for all sins offered to Crusaders, but regular indulgences are the reason for the minor penances of saying a number of “Hail Mary”s in order to be forgiven for sins confessed. When they were introduced the idea was that previous Catholics had lived such perfect lives that there’s a “treasury of merit” within the church, allowing them to give out lesser penances than the older, much harsher ones.
  • Ogres having layers is a reference to the 2001 DreamWorks animated film Shrek, in which the titular ogre (played by Mike Myers with a Scottish accent) explains to a talking Donkey (played by Eddie Murphy) that he’s not just the awful smelly monster that everyone assumes: “Ogres are like onions. They have layers. You peel them back and you find something else.” The film is (very loosely) based on a 1990 picture book by William Steig.
  • Maladict’s hallucinations make many general references to the tropes of Vietnam War films, but the main specific one we could spot was from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In the film, the character Joker (played by Matthew Modine) writes “BORN TO KILL” on his hat, which matches the undead Maladict’s “BORN TO DIE”.
  • Matchbox Twenty are an American rock band from Orlando, Florida, fronted by singer and keyboard player Rob Thomas. Their debut 1996 post-grunge album Yourself or Somebody Like You was a massive hit, including the song “Push”, most recently seen being sung by various versions of Ken in the 2023 movie Barbie.
  • Blink-182 are a Californian rock band formed in 1992 whose third album, Enema of the State (1999), was probably their biggest success, with the singles “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” doing well in many English-speaking countries at the time.
  • We last spoke of Danger 5 in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”. Created for SBS in 2012, Danger 5 is an action-comedy from the Australian comedy team Dinosaur. The first season is a parody of old school “men’s adventure” magazines and TV shows, with the titular “Danger 5” team repeatedly thwarting (though failing to capture or kill) Adolf Hitler in an absurd 1960s version of World War II. The second season from 2015 moves the team, Hitler and the target of their parody into the 1980s. You might still find it on Blu-Ray or DVD if you’re lucky; it was released by Madman Entertainment, but isn’t widely available. It was on Netflix in several territories for a while, but not any more; you can at least find clips, cast commentaries and even the prequel episode “The Diamond Girls” on the Dinosaur YouTube channel. In 2020 there was a new “Only on Audible” podcast series, Danger 5: Stereo Adventures. Dinosaur, or at least some of their creative team, have since created the animated series Koala Man for Hulu (it’s on Disney+ in Australia).

A few more notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat75 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 75, “…And That Spells Trouble”, discussing the 2012 revised edition of Guards! Guards! A Discworld Board Game, designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw, with guest Dr Melissa Rogerson.

Iconographic Evidence

Guards! Guards! has a lot more components than the other board games we’ve discussed so far. Here’s a gallery featuring the board and the playing pieces; and another with some of the specific cards we mentioned.

A photo of the game Guards! Guards! laid out on a table. Visible are the board, rulebook, top and bottom halves of the box, player reference card, three piles of volunteer cards, four dragon pieces, the Fate deck, and player boards, starting money and other tokens for three players. On the board are the token for the Luggage, the pawns for three players, and four piles of cards in the corners, two for scrolls and two for items.
All the components set up and laid out for a game, plus the box, rules and player reference card.
A photo of the cardboard standee piece of the Luggage on it’s starting space on the Guards! Guards! board, a bridge over the river Ankh.
The Luggage piece in all its glory.
A photo of the player board for the Guild of Alchemists. Three red wooden cubes marke the starting values for the stats of Charm, Magic and Guild. The board also has the Guild crest, a pentagram-shaped symbol showing which spells this player can collect, and two parchment-like sections description the Sabotage and Guild Ability rules. Above the player board are a pile of “Fire Water” markers, one cardboard $5 coin, a round green “Spell Run” marker, and a pile of square Saboteur markers.
A sample player board, in this case one for the Guild of Alchemists. The red cubes track your three player stats.
A photo of the four Saboteur markers face up, showing the crests of the four different guilds in the game, and labelled “SABOTEUR” above and the name of the quadrant: the Fool’s, Alchemist’s, Thieve’s and Assassin’s Quadrants. Some other game components are visible at the edges of the photo.
The Sabotage markers, face up. (They are kept face down in play.)
A closer photo of part of the Guards! Guards! board, showing a pattern of hexagons. Most are coloured grey with a stone-like texture; others have names and small illustrations, special spaces that allow players to perform certain actions. There are also gaps where hexagons are missing, constraining the players’ movement. A path of tiny barefoot footprints goes clockwise round the board, branching and then joining back up in some places.
Detail of the board, showing spell spaces, various locations, and the path of the Luggage (the footprints).
A photo of the four cardboard standees for the dragons in the game, on the board next to a player’s pawn. Three of them are clearly visible: the illustrations are of the head and long neck of a purple, red and green dragon.
The dragons. Oh my!
A photo of the six decks of cards for the game, each bound by a coloured rubber band.
There are a lot of cards in the game.
A photo of the Guards! Guards! board game with most of the components still in place. The game is in the final state: one player has five gold-coloured wooden cylinders arranged in a row in their slice of the central large University area, showing they’ve returned five spells. Two other players have four.
Ben’s view of the end of the game.
A photo of the Guards! Guards! board from above, showing the twelve-sided central section representing Unseen University, the River Ankh dividing the board into two halves, and the pattern of hexagonal spaces representing the city streets and various special locations. Around the outside of the board are labels showing where piles of item and spell scroll cards should go, as well as the cardinal directions of the Disc.
Just the board from above. A functional representation of Ankh-Morpork.
A close up photo of two eight-sided dice: one the plastic red one from the Guards! Guards! game, showing an eight face up; the other a gold-coloured metal die showing “7a”.
The eight-sided dice from the game, and the golden D8 from the Australian Discworld Convention.
The Guards! Guards! rulebook. The illustration on the cover shows a member of the City Watch in breastplate, leather skirt and helmet running while carrying a glowing mote of light which hovers just above his hands. He is surrounded by various other characters running with him through the streets of Ankh-Morpork at night, including a red-bearded wizard in a red robe, a Feegle riding a cat, a dwarf, an older woman in black leather armour and a huge rocky troll. A classic witch silhouette flies through the sky in the background above a full moon.
The rulebook has the same art as the box.
A photo of various volunteer cards from the Guards! Guards! board game, depicing Magrat Garlick, Granny Weatherwax, Mrs Earwig, Gladys (a Golem), Errol (a swamp dragon), the Maquis of Fantailer (a boxing fop), Moist von Lipwig/Albert Spangler (in a Groucho Marx style disguise) and Tawnee (an exotic dancer).
Some of our favourite character illustrations from the cards, and others we mentioned in the episode.
A photo of various volunteer cards from the Guards! Guards! board game, depicing Constable Visit, Detritus, Lance Corporal Cuddy, Cheery Littlebottom, Errol (the swamp dragon), Lady Sybil Ramkin, Constable Downspout (a gargoyle), Constable Brakenshield (a dwarf) and Findthee Swing.
These are the most prominent characters who appear from the Watch books, along with a few other supporting characters we love, but the main cast of Guards! Guards! do not appear!
A photo of various volunteer cards from the Guards! Guards! board game, depicting Constable Brakenshield (a dwarf), Armpit (probably a dwarf), George Aggy (senior postman) and a generic Swamp Dragon (not Errol).
Ben mentions that some of the characters who appear are a bit more obscure; here are a few examples.
A photo of two volunteer cards from the Guards! Guards! board game: Lias Bluestone and Glod Glodsson, both characters from Soul Music. Lias’ card has text from his book describing a man getting out an axe to throw at him. Glod’s card has a quote about the nature of dwarfs from Guards! Guards!
Two of our fave characters from Soul Music, who are also examples of quotes that didn’t quite hit the mark for Ben.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title was more or less inspired by the song “You’ve Got Trouble” from the musical The Music Man. In the song, con man Harold Hill convinces the residents of River City that they’ve got trouble, inventing spurious dangers to their youth which he blames on the introduction of a pool table to the town’s billiard parlour.
  • Ben wonders how up-to-date the characters are in the game. At the time it was first published in September 2011, all but the last three Discworld novels (Snuff, Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown) had been published. The game definitely includes characters from beyond the 31st novel, Monstrous Regiment, including Mrs Earwig (who didn’t appear in a novel until the 32nd book, A Hat Full of Sky); Moist von Lipwig and Gladys the golem (both introduced in the 33rd book, Going Postal); and Constable Brakenshield (a very minor charcater from Thud!, the 34th novel).
  • Ben several times mentions David Brashaw’s interview with The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret; we linked to it in the main episode description, but for completeness’ sake, it’s “Picture Books and Board Games with Pratchat and David Brashaw” from 20 November 2023. David’s interview starts at around the 1 hour, 8 minutes and 45 seconds mark. (If you’ve not listened to it already, don’t skip the start; as you may have guessed from the title, Liz and Ben are also guests!)
  • We’ve mentioned Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries many times before; it’s a television series about the high society lady Miss Phryne Fisher, who solves mysteries in 1920s Melbourne, adapted from the popular series of books by Kerry Greenwood. Liz mentions that it seems like the perfect setting for the Maquis of Fantailer, a minor character mentioned in The Fifth Elephant as the Disc’s equivalent of the Maquis of Queensberry – i.e. the nobleman who invented rules for boxing as a sport, which are entirely useless in a street fight.
  • Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022, dir. Anthony Fabian) is a British film adaptation of the 1958 novel Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris. It tells the story of Ada Harris, a working class cleaner whose husband died in World War II; she never realised she was supposed to receive a war widow pension and when she is paid it in arrears, uses the windfall to visit Paris in the hopes of buying a Dior dress.
  • On BoardGameGeek, a game’s “weight” is described as a measure of how difficult it is to understand (though not everyone thinks of it that way). A heavier weight generally means more rules and/or components, and more complex interactions and strategies; the scores are Light (1), Medium Light (2), Medium (3), Medium Heavy (4) and Heavy (5). Guards! Guards! has a weight (averaged from votes by users of the site) of 2.61 out of 5, so between Medium and Medium Light. For comparison, Monopoly scores 1.65 (between Light and Medium Light), while Chess has a weight of 3.66. (In case you’re interested, the heaviest game in Ben’s collection is Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile, with a rating of 4.11; he also has a lot of party games with a weight at or near 1.0, but most of his favourite games are Medium or Light Medium.) We’ve listed the weight of the other games suggested below for contrast, but keep in mind it’s a subjective measure; most games fall in between two of the scores.
  • Shut Up & Sit Down (SUSD) was launched in 2011. Its major components are a YouTube channel, where they are best known for their funny but thoughtful board game reviews, and a website, where they have extensive forums and written reviews and features as well. They’ve also expanded to produce a podcast, and a games convention, SHUX, which is held in Vancouver, Canada. If you like their stuff, Ben reckons you’ll also like No Pun Included, who make similarly in-depth and funny board game review videos, and also have a website and podcast (now called Talk Cardboard).
  • Unsurprisingly, we mention a lot of board games in this episode. Here’s a full list; links are to the game’s entries on BoardGameGeek.
    • Talisman (weight 2.17, Medium Light) was first published in 1983, but hit it big with the second edition in 1985. Players take are one of many fantasy archetypes like wizard, barbarian, sorceress and thief, all racing around a slightly Monopoly-like board having weird encounters as they try to reach the centre space and claim the Crown of Command. The currently available revised fourth edition is substantially similar to the earlier versions, and was first released in 2007.
    • Dungeon! (weight 1.56, Light/Medium Light) was first published in 1975 by TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons at the time. Players choose a “class” (elf, hero, superhero or wizard) and then delve into the chambers of a board designed like a dungeon, hoping to fight monsters and steal their stuff. The most recent edition was first published in 2014 by D&D’s current owners, Wizards of the Coast, and hasn’t changed much except the art and production values.
    • The Witches (weight 1.66, Light/Medium Light) is the previous Discworld board game we covered on the podcast, in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. Ben mentions it’s the “other Martin Wallace one”, the first one being Ankh-Morpork, which we have yet to discuss.
    • King of Tokyo (weight 1.49, Light/Medium Light) was first published in 2011, and has remained popular. There are a few spin-offs, including King of New York and King of Monster Island, which feature twists on the original; and plenty of expansions, mostly extra giant monsters. It also comes with a set of very satisfyingly big and heavy dice, which use symbols instead of numbers.
    • Survive: Escape from Atlantis! (weight 1.70, Medium Light) was first published in 1982, and sees players trying to get as many of their ten people to safety as possible as Atlantis sinks. The fun twist is they’re once the game starts, you can’t look at the bottom of your people tokens – and they’re each worth a different number of points. A 30th anniversary edition is still in print. The dolphin, giant squid and two other expansions were available combined in one box, but are a bit hard to find now.
    • Reign of Cthulhu (weight 2.16, Medium Light) is the 2016 game Liz mentions playing at a board game cafe in New Zealand. It is based on Pandemic by Matt Leacock, but is now marketed as a “Pandemic System Game” rather than having “Pandemic” in the title. Players work together to close magical gates to other dimensions before an ancient “Old One” – a cosmic entity with the power of a god – arrives to destroy the world.
    • Castles of Mad King Ludwig (weight 2.65, Medium Light/Medium) has players trying to build a castle that will please the randomly selected whims of the King. It’s (very) loosely based on the real King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who spent his fortunes on building a number of lavish castles during the nineteenth century, earning him the nickname “the Fairytale King”. Ben also likes the spin-off game The Palace of Mad King Ludwig, in which all the players build the same castle.
    • Big Top (weight 1.03, Light) from GameWright is, as Melissa mentions, one of many versions of the game originally published as Barnyard Buddies in 1996. (The versions are pretty much identical aside from art and theme, so there’s just one entry for all of them on BGG.)
    • Kingdomino (weight 1.22, Light) is a 2016 game in which players build medieval kingdoms by playing domino-like tiles showing various kinds of land, like fields, lakes and mountains. It’s been a pretty big success and has spawned many spin-offs and similar games, including Queendomino, which can be combined with the original.
    • Daybreak (weight 2.96, Medium) is Matt Leacock’s 2023 game of fighting climate change. It’s really interesting and important, but also great fun to play. Has a great solo mode.
    • Paperback Adventures (weight 2.70, Medium) is a solo deckbuilding game where you make words out of letter cards to generate points used by your protagonist character to fight a series of six villains. It does have rules for two players, but they’re generally not considered that great; but you can play it with multiple players cooperating to work out the best word to play! Ben has all three of the available characters, and loves them all, but if he had to pick a favourite it’s a toss-up between assassin princess Damsel and undead pirate Plot Hook.
  • Liz mentioned the Quarter Quell, which she also referenced last episode; it’s a special version of the Hunger Games (from the book series of the same name by Suzanne Collins), a death match by lottery imposed by the fascist state, where they bend the usual rules to make it even more horrible.

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