Discworld

#Pratchat79 – Unalive from Überwald

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Recorded live at the Australian Discworld Convention in Tarntanyangga (Adelaide), Karen J Carlisle and Tansy Rayner Roberts join us on stage to discuss short fiction, Death and the (sort of) last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld short stories, 2004’s “Death and What Comes Next”.

Somewhere in time and space, a philosopher lies on his deathbed…and Death has come to collect. Only the philosopher isn’t convinced he’s real, or that any of this is even happening. Will “quantum” and cats in boxes be enough of an argument to dissuade Death from his job?

Created for the now defunct Time Hunt puzzle website, “Death and What Comes Next” was written somewhere between 2002 and 2004. At under 1,000 words it’s one of Pratchett’s shorter pieces of fiction, and contains several jokes he’d go on to re-use elsewhere, as well as a word puzzle which provided a code word for Time Hunt site. You can read the story for free at the L-Space Web, which also hosts fan translations in many languages.

Despite its placement in A Blink of the Screen, is this truly a Discworld story? Have you tried to solve the puzzle? How would you challenge Death to delay the time of your passing – and have you thought about what an encounter with the Discworld Death might be like for you? And is Death at his funniest here, or do you have other favourite Death moments? Join the conversation by using the hashtag #Pratchat79 on social media.

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy, cosy crime and much, much more. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men, “Men Who Respect Witches”, can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Her latest novel is a time travel comedy called Time of the Cat, and you can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media. Tansy was also a guest on our previous live episode, “A Troll New World”, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.

Guest Karen J Carlisle (she/her) is a writer and illustrator based in Adelaide whose work spans Victorian mystery, steampunk, fantasy and yes, even (mostly) cosy murders. She has some new writing in the works, but her recent “Jack the Ripper thing” is Blood Ties, which you can find via her website, karenjcarlisle.com. You can also find her on Instagram, Twitter and various other social platforms as @karenjcarlisle.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next month it’s back to the books as we rejoin Moist von Lipwig for Making Money! Send us your questions about the book ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat80.

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#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2nd Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic.

Iconographic Evidence

You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

The ridiculous fight between Xander and cheerleader-turned-vampire Harmony, occurs in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer‘s fourth season, in the seventh episode “The Initiative”. But you can see it on YouTube:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is references Joel’s comments that this book is the “primordial soup” of the Discworld books yet to come, the analogy of the “cosmic ocean” put forward by Carl Sagan in his book and television series Cosmos, and of course Great A’Tuin the World Turtle himself.
  • The term “hat-trick” does indeed originate with cricket, where it means taking three wickets (i.e. getting the batter out) on three consecutive deliveries (i.e. a single bowl of the ball). It has since spread to other sports and to mean more generally three successful attempts in a row. (In football, it specifically refers to a player scoring three goals in one game.) The term dates back to 1858, when English cricketer Heathfield Harman Stephenson performed the first recorded hat-trick; fans collected up money for him and used it to buy a hat, which they presented to him to commemorate the achievement. While this story seems well-documented, if Helen Zaltzman (see below) has taught Ben anything, it’s to be suspicious of neat etymological explanations…
  • The custom of throwing hats in the air to celebrate a victory or achievement is said by multiple sources to be a military tradition: cadets graduating to officer status would be given new hats, or at least no longer need to wear their old cadet ones, and they would symbolically throw them away. At least one story says this started specifically at the US Naval Academy with the class of 1912.
  • Helen Zaltzman is a comedian, writer and podcaster best known for the long-running comedy podcast Answer Me This? with fellow comedian Olly Mann, and her more recent show, The Allusionist, which explores language in as many different ways as possible. The Allusionist started out as part of the Radiotopia Network, but went fully independent in 2020 as part of Helen putting her money where her mouth was in backing diversity and inclusion in podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting The Allusionist via Patreon. Oh, and we nearly forgot: Helen also makes a Veronica Mars recap podcast called Veronica Mars Investigations! Helen is the best.
  • “Commitment to the bit“, or “commit to the bit“, is a common phrase in comedy circles. It means to stick with a joke or comic premise all the way to the end, rather than shy away from it because it it doesn’t immediately work, or is impractical or uncomfortable. It’s obviously not always a good tactic, as seen recently during Eurovision 2021. Iceland employed actor Hannes Óli Ágústsson to relay their jury’s points in character as Olaf Yohansson from the comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Olaf’s whole shtick is that he only likes one song, “Ja Ja Ding Dong”, which he awkwardly and angrily demands at every opportunity. At the contest, he tried to give Iceland’s 12 points to the song – twice. Few things are as hated at Eurovision as a country’s jury announcer talking too long before delivering the points, so this over-commitment to the bit did not go down well.
  • The Colour of Magic was first published on the 24th of November, 1983 (one day after the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who!), and so its 35th anniversary was two weeks before #Pratchat14, published on December 8, 2018. It originally had cover art of Great A’Tuin swimming through space painted by Alan Smith; the Josh Kirby art first appeared on the first UK paperback edition, published in March 1985. The Light Fantastic was first published on the 2nd of June, 1986, so we’re a bit closer to the anniversary this time around!
  • Liz’s “double book” is the combined edition of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic published in 2008, to tie in with The Mob’s two-part television adaptation The Colour of Magic, which also combined both books. They had previously been collected as a single volume in 1999 as The First Discworld Novels.
  • Liz’s annoyance with the “cosmic turtle business” at the start of many of the earlier Discworld books is well documented in many previous episodes.
  • In The Colour of Magic, Krull’s spaceship the Potent Voyager is only vaguely described as being made of bronze and looking “like a great flying fish”. The graphic novel depicts it as fish shaped, but without the wing-fins of a flying fish.
  • The Rocket Clock is one of the clocks used by the Australian version of Playschool to help tell the time in the 1980s. (The other famous one is the Flower Clock.) As you might expect, it resembles a space rocket, with a clock on the top section, and a bottom section which rotates to reveal a small diorama connected to a theme explored in that episode. The original version of the clock, used from 1966 to at least the 1980s, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
  • Mr Squiggle was a long-running Australian children’s program starring puppet character Mr Squiggle, “the Man in the Moon”. It ran for forty years between 1959 and 1999. Mr Squiggle, who would arrive in “Rocket“, his smoke-belching impatient rocket ship, had a pencil for a nose. He would use it to turn “squiggles” – scribbles sent in by children – into pictures. Because he was a marionette, puppeteer Norman Heatherington was watching upside down from above, so a lot of his drawings were upside down. This led to him having to tell his assistant, who was holding the puppet’s hand to keep him still, that “Everything’s upside down, Miss Jane”. He would later inspire the title of #Pratchat55: “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters whose power is measured in “levels”. As they accumulate experience, they gain levels of power and new abilities. In the current edition all characters can reach up to level 20, with wizards learning more and more powerful spells as they level up. Ben has mentioned Dungeons & Dragons many times, as far back as #Pratchat4; his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” is a good primer for the novice, though note it’s a little sweary.
  • The Necrotelicomnicon is mentioned in several books, including The Colour of Magic, Sourcery and Moving Pictures. It’s a pun on the Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil magic written by the “Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” that appears in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
  • “Vancian magic” is the sort used in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, in which a wizard must study their spell book and memorise a spell, fixing it in their mind, before they can cast it. Once cast, the spell leaves their mind entirely, and they must memorise it anew to cast it again. The name comes from the source that inspired this form of spellcasting, the “Dying Earth” books by American writer Jack Vance.
  • The comic with several different Joker origin stories is probably 2020’s Three Jokers, by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok, which reveals that three of the stories are correct – there have been more than one Joker all along. But he’s had many other origin stories; this article from Screen Rant runs through many of them.
  • In case the pun is lost on you, timber is wood that’s been prepared for building, usually by being sawn into planks. Timbre is the quality of tone of a sound, especially a voice or musical instrument. You can think of it as all the things that distinguish two sounds of the same frequency from each other.
  • The Tooth Fairy – well, one of them at least – plays a major part in Hogfather (#Pratchat24). Buggy Swires is a gnome exterminator living in Ankh-Morpork; he returns in several books, starting with Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24). The pictsies known as the Nac Mac Feegle first appear in Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36).
  • Toadstool houses are the traditional homes of Smurfs, small blue creatures invented in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, about Pratchett’s second tiny people book, Truckers; and in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”, about the book that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle, Carpe Jugulum. (There’s more detail about the Smurfs in the show notes for #Pratchat36.)
  • Lonely Planet is a prominent publisher of travel guides for tourists on a budget. In the pre-smartphone days every backpacker bought a Lonely Planet guide to the country where they were headed, but in recent years – especially since the global pandemic – their business has waned. The company was started in Australia by Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 1972, but was later sold to the BBC and is now owned by Red Media, the company behind CNET, Metacritic and GameSpot, among other prominent online media outlets.
  • Pratchett writes about tiny people many times, including in his first novel The Carpet People, the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and the various tiny denizens of the Discworld, most prominently gnomes and pictsies.
  • While houses made of food or confectionary date back further, the gingerbread cottage appears in the fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel”, collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. “Hansel and Gretel” is the archetypal story of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. Pratchett returns to the idea in the witches books, especially Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4). The witches refer to Aliss Demurrage, aka “Black Aliss”, as a witch who worked some of the greatest magic, but also as a cautionary tale: she built a gingerbread cottage, a sure sign she’d gone to the bad, and by the end was making poisoned apples before she was pushed into her own oven by children she was trying to eat. (Her cottage is also said to be in Skund, leading some Pratchett fans to suggest that Granny Whitlow was an alias she used to lure children.)
  • The Rite of AshkEnte is performed here, and also in Mort (when it summons Mort as well as Death), Reaper Man, and Soul Music (where it summons Susan). Death tends to show up without needing to be asked in later books.
  • We have a play with the famous “you have my sword” sequence from the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn’t appear in the book. (Frodo does say “I will take the Ring to Mordor!” and then “Though I do not know the way” in the book, but Elrond decides who will accompany him after the council is over.) Here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Frodo: I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though… I do not know the way.
Gandalf: I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear.
Aragorn: If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my axe!

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson)
  • You can find Fury’s drawing of the Luggage as Trunkie from The Last Continent in the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • The Last Continent was published twelve years after The Light Fantastic, in 1998, so Liz was pretty close with her guess of ten years.
  • Liz suggests the Luggage might have “a chamber full of pigs?” in reference to the “having your enemies’ corpses eaten by pigs” method of getting away with murder. This features prominently in the television series Deadwood, and also Guy Richie’s film Snatch. You can find a list of uses as the “Fed to Pigs” trope on TV Tropes. Ben also mentions a bath full of (Hollywood style) acid, most famously used by Walter White in Breaking Bad.
  • Pratchett uses the Megalith pun in Lords and Ladies: “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” This is a pun on MegaHertz (MHz), the unit used to measure the clock speed or clock rate of computer processors – in simple terms, how many instructions they execute per second. In the 1980s, home computers used chips like Intel’s 386, which had speeds of between 16 and 40 MHz. While it was used heavily in marketing, clock speed was not a sure measure of computer performance.
  • Pratchett moved to Broad Chalke in Wiltshire in 1993, seven years after The Light Fantastic was published. Before that he lived in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, about 67 kilometres (or about 42 miles) to the northwest. He was never very far from many sites of ancient interest, but Broad Chalke was only a stone’s throw (sorry) from Stonehenge.
  • There are several stone circles better than Stonehenge, depending on who you ask and how you define “better”, but the one at Avebury is about 30km to the north and much, much bigger. Longtime British YouTuber Tom Scott made this video about it.
  • The Small Faint Group of Boring Stars is mentioned again in The Last Continent; the wizards travel quite far back in time, to an age when the stars were much closer and less faint (though possibly just as boring).  
  • The Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán is one of the 52 states of Mexico. There are several theories behind its name, and there are two versions of the “Your Finger You Fool” type: one involves the Mayan phrase Ma’anaatik ka t’ann, or “I do not understand you”, and the other uh yu ka t’ann, or “hear how they talk”. Another involves the casava plant, known locally as yuca (see #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl” for more on this plant) which was cultivated in the area, the name Yucatá meaning “land of yucas”. A third one suggests the name comes from the local Chontal Maya people, who call themselves the Yokot’anob or Yokot’an, meaning “the speakers of Yoko ochoco”.
  • Cohen is not in fact mentioned in The Colour of Magic; this is the first time we meet him.
  • The famous “What is best in life?” dialogue was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, based on the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. The lines in full are below; they don’t appear in Robert E Howard’s stories, but are instead inspired by words attributed to Genghis Khan himself…

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good but what is best in life?
Mongol Soldier: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982, dir. John Milius)
  • The people around the breakfast table in The Truth are Mr Windling and the other lodgers at Mars Arcanum’s guest house, where William de Worde lives. He doesn’t tell them he’s the editor of The Ankh-Morpork Times. (We covered The Truth in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing”.
  • The cover art we’re talking about is the Josh Kirby art for the Corgi edition, still used for the Corgi edition (though the one currently in print uses a zoomed in subset of the image). You can find it on the official Josh Kirby website.
  • The “uncanny valley” describes the discomfort felt at seeing an artificial creature that is very like, but not mistakable for, the real thing. It can apply to anything living but is strongest – and most often used – to refer to the effect produced by androids and computer-generated representations of faces. There are many theories that try and account for why these things creep it out.
  • In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, a pair of creepy twins appear as ghosts. The “Grady twins” are not twins in the book, but sisters aged 8 and 10, and are only mentioned, rather than appearing as ghosts. In the film, they appear to the young psychic Danny Torrance, dressed identically and speaking to him in unison saying “Come and play with us” – now a famous classic line of horror cinema. Though Kubrick denied it was intentional, many have pointed out that the look of the twins in the film resembles the photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by American photographer Diane Arbus.
  • Mort was published in November 1987, so about seventeen months after The Light Fantastic. Liz’s guess of seven months is spot on for the third Discworld book, though – Equal Rites was published in January 1987!
  • It was announced on the 28th of April, 2020 that Narrativia had made an exclusive new deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content to produce “definitive” and “absolutely faithful” Discworld adaptations for the screen. So far no actual productions have been announced, but the Narrativia website now has sections for all of the major Discworld screen projects of the last decade or so. The page about the new Discworld deal still lists only the initial agreement.
  • The extra space in Death’s House is described near the start of Soul Music, when Death watches Albert flit from the edge of his impossibly large office to the edge of the carpet around his desk:

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…

Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)
  • By season three of The Good Place, the humans who are at the centre of the show have been exposed to a lot of the weirdness that exists beyond the mortal, material world. Near the end of the season, an accident in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes” sends Chidi briefly to another realm, and when he returns he describes it like this:

Chidi Anagonye: I… I just saw a trillion different realities folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal forming… a single blade.

Michael: Yeah yeah, the Time-Knife. We’ve all seen it.

The Good Place, season 3 episode 12, “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” (2019)
  • The Untempered Schism is “a gap in the fabric of reality from which can be seen the whole of the Vortex” of space and time. It’s introduced at the end of the third season of the revived Doctor Who in the penultimate episode, “The Sound of Drums”. The Doctor explains that it’s an initiation rite for young Gallifreyans, who at the age of eight must stare into it; according to him, “some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” He says he ran away; the Master instead went mad, constantly hearing “the drumming”, though this is later revealed to be more than it seems.
  • The Doctor Who universe influencer jokes refer to the city of New New York, as introduced in the episode “New Earth”; the “EarPods” used by alternate universe Cybermen to control and convert humans, as seen in the two-part season two story “Rise of the Cyberman”/”The Age of Steel”; and the Adipose, a species of creatures whose cute babies could be incubated in a human body by accumulating fat tissue, under the guise of a diet pill, as seen in the season four opening episode “Partners in Crime”. The idea of influencers in the Whoniverse isn’t a million miles away from the later BBC fiction podcast Doctor Who: Redacted, published in April 2022, which features a gang of podcasters who follow a conspiracy theory about a blue box associated with mysteries throughout human history.
  • Icelandic names are subject to some fairly strict conventions, overseen by the Icelandic Naming Committee. There’s a list of around 4,000 traditional Icelandic names which can be used freely, but new names must be approved by the committee. In addition, by convention Icelandic people take either their father’s or mother’s name as a surname, appended with -son, –dottir or (since 2019) –bur for son, daughter or child, respectively. Episode 87 of The Allusionist podcast, “Name v. Law”, covers some of this in detail, though note it was released in 2018, before the change allowing non-gendered suffixes. The Allusionist returned to Icelandic names in December 2021 for episode 147, the second of the two-part story, “Survival: Today, Tomorrow” about trying to change the Icelandic language.
  • “That bit in The Hobbit” is Chapter II, “Roast Mutton”, when Bilbo is scouting ahead of the company of dwarves and comes upon three trolls named William, Bert and Tom. Bilbo is caught picking a troll’s pocket (Tolkien trolls wear trousers!), and he and the dwarves are caught. Gandalf manages to keep all three trolls arguing with each other, distracting them until the sun comes up and turns them to stone.
  • 5G, short for fifth-generation, is the name given to the newest mobile communications network technology being rolled out around the world. 5G is capable of far greater data transfer speeds than its predecessor 4G, at least at short range. It has been the subject of many conspiracy theories that claim it causes health problems in humans, despite a lack of any evidence that this is true. These theories mutated during 2020 to suggest that 5G caused or spread COVID-19, and they were believed enough that 5G towers in several countries were vandalised.
  • Lackjaw does indeed describe himself as “of the dwarfish persuasion“.
  • The magic shop trope can be traced back as far as H. G. Wells’ stories The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903). TV Tropes lists it as “The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday” and has many other examples. Pratchett revisits it in a more traditional way in Soul Music (discussed by us in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Rocks In”), where Buddy buys his guitar. It’s not the same shop, though – the proprietor is an old woman who seems quite happy with her lot, and she seems to sell only musical instruments.
  • We keep mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle, so it’s probably a good idea for us to do that Diana Wynne Jones episode we keep talking about. Previous episodes where this book have been mentioned include #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30 and #Pratchat43. In a nutshell: Howl is a wizard who lives as a recluse in a castle that not only can move from place to place, but has a magical front door that can open in one of several fixed locations.
  • Cane toads, Rhinella marina, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 for purposes of pest control on sugar cane farms. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, where we recommended in the episode notes the documentaries Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and its sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). You can indeed still get various souvenirs made from dead toads; you can see examples at the website Souvenirs Australia (though it’s not a pretty sight).
  • The “critical Black Mass” pun is not about wizards or gods, but rather books of magic. It comes up in a description of the library as Trymon heads there to bribe the Librarian while the wizards are still speaking to Death.
  • Bethan is not mentioned in Interesting Times. Rincewind does mention in Sourcery that he was a guest at Cohen’s wedding to “a girl of about Conina’s age”, but Bethan isn’t mentioned by name and Rincewind gives no indication that he knows how the marriage went.
  • We looked up Echidna penises for #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“.
  • Rincewind will return in The Last Hero, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgment Day. He’s also a minor character in Unseen Academicals, and mentioned briefly in Raising Steam.
  • Michael Moorcock’s “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy” is less an essay, and more of a book, first published in 1987. An expanded edition, now 206 pages long, was released in 2004.
  • Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game written and designed by John Harper and published in 2015. It’s set in an “industrial-fantasy” world, and players form a company of criminals who try to stake a claim for themselves in the inescapable city of Duskvol, surrounded by horror and haunted by deadly ghosts. Among its distinctive features are a system of retroactively planning heists and packing gear, which gets you into the action quicker. If industrial-fantasy isn’t your thing the system has also been used to make several other games in other genres.
  • Campaign settings are the various fantasy worlds used for Dungeons & Dragons and other games which aren’t tied too much to a specific universe. D&D has a large number of these covering various sub-genres of fantasy, from the post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery of Dark Sun to the gothic horror of Ravenloft. There are too many to list them all, since aside from the dozens of official ones there are many more published independently. (Ben’s favourite is probably Planescape, which both ties together all the others in a weird multiverse, and introduces an interdimensional hub city on the inside of a ring in the theoretical centre of everything.)
  • Mage: The Ascension, first published in 1993, was the third game in the World of Darkness series of modern horror roleplaying games, following Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Mage is also effectively a sequel to the earlier game about medieval wizards, Ars Magicka, but in the modern world the rise of science and rational thought means magic doesn’t work like it used to.
  • Cavaliers of Mars by Rose Bailey is the latest in a fine tradition of games that seek to emulate the “planetary romance” genre of fiction. These were science fiction or fantasy stories from around the turn of the twentieth century in which the fantastic adventures take place on other worlds – either in our own solar system as in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (adapted as the hugely underrated film John Carter), or in other galaxies entirely – for example, James Herbert’s Dune is sometimes classified as a planetary romance.
  • The Old-School Renaissance or Revival – usually abbreviated to OSR – is a movement in roleplaying game communities which prefers the early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and similar games from the 1970s and 1980s. There are now many games that seek to recapture the feel of those games, either by re-implementing the original rules (a genre known as “retro-clones”) or writing games with more modern rules but the old-school philosophy in mind. Exactly what that philosophy is varies according to who you ask, but it usually means a smaller set of rules, and more reliance on both player skill (as opposed to rules which emulate the skill of the characters being played) and rulings by the Game Master (who OSR games often call the referee). Famous examples include Torchbearer, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) and Old-School Essentials. Dungeon World isn’t usually counted as an OSR game, but it has many similarities. (It’s a translation of D&D-like fantasy into the now super popular “Powered by the Apocalypse” framework, created by Meguey & Vincent Baker for their post-apocalyptic RPG Apocalypse World.)
  • The six flavours of quarks are up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom. “Flavour” is the name given to unique combinations of other characteristics like spin and charge; it’s sometimes also called “species”. Quarks form other particles, like neutrons and protons, when three of them are combined in different flavour combinations.
  • The World War II realtime Twitter account is @RealTimeWWII. It tweets “on this day” war events from the years 1939 to 1945, and is currently up to 1943 on its second time around.
  • In Chinese numerology, four – 四 (Anglicised as sì or sei) – is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for “death”, 死 (sǐ or séi). This causes as serious an aversion as Europeans traditionally have to the number thirteen, and just as some might have triskaidekaphobia, in China and other parts of East Asia, tetraphobia is common enough that buildings do not number floors using the digit 4.

#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.

#Pratchat1 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the notes and errata for episode 1, “Boots Theory“, featuring guest Cal Wilson discussing the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms.

  • We did indeed have Cal back to discuss Sourcery – see #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. Cal also returned for our fiftieth episode, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, to discuss Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Tragically Cal passed away unexpectedly in 2023; but a person’s not dead while their name is still spoken. GNU Cal Wilson.
  • For more on our decision to start with Men at Arms, see #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and also Liz’s post, “Let’s Start From the Very Beginning (but not actually)”.
  • Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, and the second to feature the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Ben does now write these things down (and, indeed, has a very comprehensive spreadsheet).
  • What Ben meant about the copyright on “Discworld” is that this is the first book in which “Discworld” appears on the imprint page as a registered trademark. Intellectual property (or IP) law is a complex topic, and can differ greatly from region to region, but to cover the basics:
    • Copyright (denoted by ©) is the protection of original works from being copied or otherwise used without the creator’s permission. This mostly applies to literary, dramatic, musical or other artistic work (including visual art), often lasts for a fixed period (the creators’ life plus 70 years in Australia), and is automatically applied without a creator having to do anything. A creator can extend it to others, as Terry later did by assigning copyright to he and his wife Lyn, and then their company, Dunmanifestin Limited. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, only the specific expression of ideas, which is where some of the complexity comes in.
    • A trademark (denoted by ™️ or ®) is a “sign” that shows a product was made by a certain person or company. The sign can be almost anything: a word, a specific colour or style of packaging, a logo, a design, even a sound. It’s an old concept, similar to the “maker’s mark” used by artisans that is often mentioned in Antique Roadshow on silverware, jewellery, ceramics and so on. Anyone can start using the ™️ symbol, which suggests a common law trademark, but the ® denotes a registered trademark which is more easily enforceable by law. These are managed by government agencies (e.g. IP Australia). Also worthy of note is that if you have a trademark, you have to actively be using it, and you must defend it if someone else starts using it, or you will likely lose it.
    • It didn’t come up in this episode, but there are some complexities involved if a copyright belongs to a company and that company ceases to exist without its assets being transferred to another company or person. In the UK this can mean ownership of a work transfers half to the original creators, and half to the Crown, which has led to speculation that King Charles now owns half the rights to the Discworld videogames – though this has yet to be resolved…
  • You’ve probably heard of the Thames, but the Yarra is the common name for the river Birrarung or Biarrarung Marr, which flows through the heart of Melbourne, or Narrm. It runs for nearly 250 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges in inland Victoria to the ocean in Port Phillip Bay, though its course and nature has been changed extensively since European colonisation. It was previously nicknamed “the upside down river” due to the golden-brown muddy colouring it acquires by the time it flows through Melbourne. This is also the product of colonisation, as land clearing and mining have increased the erosion of surrounding fine clay into the water.
  • The negative reviewer of Pratchett’s work to which Ben refers was Northern Irish poet and literary critic Tom Paulin, who appeared on BBC2’s Late Review television program and derided Pratchett, writing him off as a populist: “… selling thousands of copies – a complete amateur – doesn’t even write in chapters – hasn’t a clue.” This seems to have been in around 1993 or 1994; Pratchett proudly reproduced the quote in the front many of his books, with the earliest example Ben can find being in the 1995 Corgi paperback of Interesting Times.
  • Terry Pratchett’s debut novel, The Carpet People, was first published in 1971, when Pratchett was 23 years old. However an earlier version of the story was serialised as some of his very first published fiction in the Bucks’ Free Press in 1965, when he was only 17! Most of the instalments of that version appear in the second collection of his early stories, Dragons at Crumbling Castle, published shortly after Pratchett’s death in 2015.
  • While the Vimes Boots Theory is articulated in the way of Pratchett, the idea behind it is of course not new. We’d like to thank Jeanette Hall on Twitter, who shared a link to an earlier version of the Boots Theory! In 1914, Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan wrote published the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, “Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell.” (Tressell was the pen-name used by Noonan.) Based on his life working in Hastings between 1906 and 1910, the book contains a passage about the price of stockings and coal and how they are the means by which “the working classes are robbed.” We’ve included an excerpt below, but you can read the original text at the Union History website shared by Jeanette. You can also see the original manuscript! (This feels especially poignant because Ben’s own Great Great Grandfather was a painter in Belfast until his death in 1910 prompted the McKenzies to migrate to Australia.)

Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price.

Six weeks previously Owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. Nora’s shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine.

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, 1914
  • Also of note: the Vimes Boots Theory influenced the work of UK equality and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who in January 2022 created the Vimes Boots Poverty Index. The Index was intended to be a record of the prices of staple foods and other essentials over time, to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of rising prices on the poor. It was also specifically meant to show that government reports which only take inflation into account are inadequate, since they are not an accurate indicator of the way goods prices change. The Pratchett Estate – particularly Rhianna Pratchett – wholeheartedly endorsed this use of Vimes’ name. In the end, media and social media attention for the idea (using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex) was enough to persuade the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) to change how they calculated cost of living expenses, largely making the compilation of the Index unnecessary. You can read more about it on the L-Space wiki.
  • Scooby-Doo is a children’s adventure show which began in 1969 with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! It centres on a group of mystery-solving teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Shaggy’s dog, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. Sometimes calling themselves “Mystery Inc.”, the group travel America in a mini-van called the Mystery Machine investigating supposedly supernatural occurrences. Famously most of their adventures end by revealing that the ghost, monster or other weirdness was a hoax all along, perpetrated by an old man in a costume. The show was hugely influential – not least because it helped fill the gap left after more violent superhero cartoons of the 60s like Space Ghost and The Herculoids were cancelled following protests from parent groups. There have been numerous animated series and films, and even live-action films, since 1969, and more are still being made. The characters are not usually explicitly romantically linked; Cal references a reboot that had genius Velma and dorky hippie Shaggy dating, and this has happened at least a couple of times. They are shown to try dating in both the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and the 2011 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster (a sequel to the 2009 reboot of the previous live-action films from 2002 and 2004). For the record, in both versions they quickly realise they don’t have a spark and remain “just friends”.
  • It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King in which a group of teenagers face a nameless evil creature, the titular “It”, which changes shape to evoke fear in its victims. It primarily appears in the shape of a clown named “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”. In a memorable sequence from early in the novel – replicated in both the 1990 TV mini-series adaptation and the first of the two-part film adaptations in 2017 – the Clown appears in the town sewer. In both versions Pennywise has primarily white-face makeup, not dissimilar to Paul Kidby’s version of Dr Whiteface. (“It” was portrayed by Tim Curry in 1990, and Bill Skarsgård in 2017.)
  • Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed. In the UK, the tradition can be traced back to Stan Built in the 1930s, though most of his original eggs were damaged or destroyed. In 1988 (or 1984 according to some sources), Clown Bluey, Chairman of Clowns International at the time, resurrected the tradition. This mini documentary from 2017 features Debbie Smith, the Clown Egg Gallery artist from 2010 to 2023. Clowns International still seems to run the egg gallery, with their website including a form to order a pair of eggs (one for the gallery and one for you), now painted by current artist Julie Proctor. So we’re sorry again, clowns. (Thanks to Maia in Michigan, who put us onto some sources via Twitter which helped us update this entry!)
  • Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
  • 99% Invisible is a podcast all about design, hosted by Roman Mars. The episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben while discussing the Alchemist’s Guild is “The Post-Billiards Age” from May 2015. (This episode will get mentioned again in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.)
  • There are indeed ghosts on the Discworld, appearing in several of the novels. We’ll be meeting some of them fairly soon, as one plays a major role in Wyrd Sisters. (See #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”.)
  • The final Discworld book is actually The Shepherd’s Crown; I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth-last, and the second-last to feature young witch Tiffany Aching. (We try to keep our spreadsheet handy in future episodes to avoid such basic mistakes.)
  • “Shoot” is used for arrows, as the term predates guns by many centuries.
  • CMOT Dibbler is pervasive once he arrives, but is not in The Colour of Magic. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”.) In fact he first shows up when the Watch does, in Guards! Guards! (See #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.)
  • Not only are Lord Vetinari’s plans for the future unknown, but it has also never been revealed how he ascended to the position of Patrician in the first place. We do get a little of his backstory in Night Watch; see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”.
  • We are aware that despite being asked “which Guild would you join”, we decided we would be wizards, witches or members of the Watch, none of which have an official guild – at least at the time of Men at Arms. See #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, for the creation of at least a temporary guild of Watchmen in The Fifth Elephant.

#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.

#Pratchat76 – Real Men Don’t Drink…Decaf

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Kiwi writer and poet Freya Daly Sadgrove joins Liz and Ben from Sydney as we adjust our uniforms and march into the horrible realities of war (class, gender and literal) to discuss Terry Pratchett’s thirty-first Discworld novel, 2003’s Monstrous Regiment.

Polly Perks has cut off her hair, put on some trousers and joined the army under the name of Oliver, all so she can find her strong but gentle-minded brother, Paul. Is soon turns out that her regiment, led by the infamous Sergeant Jackrum who swears to look after “his little lads”, is quite possibly the last one left in all of Borogravia. In her search for Paul, Polly will have to deal with the enemy, the free press, a vampire who might kill for a coffee, Sam Vimes, and The Secret: she might not be the only impostor in the ranks…

Coming in between the first two Tiffany Aching novels, Monstrous Regiment – which is also monstrous in size, possibly Pratchett’s second longest novel – is the last truly standalone Discworld story. It introduces a wonderful cast of characters who, sadly, we’ll never see again. Not only that, but it gives major supporting roles to old favourites Sam Vimes and William de Worde, with a side order of Otto von Chriek! Critics at the time compared it to Evelyn Waugh, Jonathan Swift and All Quiet on the Western Front, and it remains one of Pratchett’s most beloved and celebrated novels – both for what it says about war, and about gender.

Did you know The Secret before you read Monstrous Regiment? What’s it like re-reading it when you do know? How do you feel about the ending(s)? How does Pratchett’s handling of gender hold up against our modern understanding? What would you prohibit, in Nugganite fashion? And would you rather have a type of food or clothing named after you? Get on board the conversation for this episode with the hashtag #Pratchat76.

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Freya Daly Sadgrove (she/her) is a pākehā writer and performance poet from New Zealand, currently living in Sydney. Her first book of poetry, Head Girl, was published in 2020 by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and she is one of the creators of New Zealand live poetry showcase Show Ponies, which presents poets like they’re pop stars. Her first full-length live show, 2023’s Whole New Woman, blended poetry with live rock music. Freya has a website at freyadalysad.com (though it might not be available at the moment), and you can also find her as @FreyaDalySad on Twitter.

As usual you’ll find comprehensive notes and errata for this episode on our website, including lots of photos of the components we discuss.

Next episode we’re discussing two short stories about animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (found in A Blink of the Screen) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (from A Stroke of the Pen). Our guest will be the author of The Animals in That Country, Laura Jean McKay. Get your questions in by mid-April 2024 by replying to us or using the hashtag #Pratchat77 on social media, or email us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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.

#Pratchat67 – The Three-Elf Problem

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This month we welcome back the very game Steve Lamattina as we put on our witch’s hats, grab our brooms and head out into Lancre to solve problems in Martin Wallace’s The Witches, the fourth official Discworld board game.

As Tiffany Aching or one of her fellow apprentice witches, you’ll run around Lancre solving problems big and small with headology and magic, helped by an assortment of local characters. But it’s not just about getting the highest score – you’ll also need to watch each other’s backs or everyone in the kingdom could lose! Be sure to stop and share tea, or you might end up a cackler…

Which witch is your favourite? How does The Witches rank against the other Discworld board games? Do you see it as a great family game, a mediocre co-op challenge, or something in between? Who do you wish had been included as a card or playable character? And would you use the game to introduce your friends to board games, the Discworld, or both?

Check out the episode notes for pictures of the game components, and use the hashtag #Pratchat67 on social media to join in the conversation on this one!

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Steve Lamattina is a writer and editor whose work spans film, music, education and technology. He was once CEO of the youth publishing company Express Media, whom we still stan, and currently works for the Victorian Department of Education. You can find him on Twitter as @steve_lamattina.

Next month we’re going back…back to nearly the beginning! Yes, for #Pratchat68 we’re setting the procrastinator coordinates for 1981 as we read and discuss Pratchett’s proto-Discworld sci-fi novel Strata. It’s a nice short book to get in before we tackle The Long Utopia in July… Use the hashtag #Pratchat68 to send us questions about Strata!

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

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.

#Pratchat74 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 74, “Hogswitch”, an interview with the authors of Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent.

Iconographic Evidence

This is “Love is All”, the music video Ben talks about for a song from the 1974 concept album The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. See below for the origins of the album, which was written by Roger Glover and featured lots of high profile rock stars, including here Ronnie James Dio as the frog.

Notes and Errata

  • The talk at the British Library mentioned by Rhianna is the book’s launch event at the British Library, organised by the Living Knowledge Network and held in conjunction with the “Fantasy: Realms of Imagination” exhibition. It was held on 27 October 2023, the day after the book’s original release date – the release was delayed by Typhoon Saola, which delayed shipping to the UK including the initial supplies of the book. You can watch the whole event on the Living Knowledge Network website.
  • The talk at Waterstones Picadilly is not available as a video or audio recording; you had to be there, folks! For those not in the know, Waterstones is one of the major book chains in the UK, and the Picadilly store is one of their flagship shops in London. Its hosted many Pratchett events in the past, including a midnight opening for The Shepherd’s Crown, an event for Crystal of Storms (see below), and many signings.
  • Travelling Man is a games, comics and fantasy books business with stores in Leeds, York, Newcastle and Manchester in the UK. They also run their own small press. You can find outmore about them at travellingman.com.
  • Crystal of Storms is Rhianna’s 2020 Fighting Fantasy book: a branching narrative told in the second person in which the reader chooses their path through the story, and also must occasionally roll dice to try and overcome obstacles and defeat monsters. The series was created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop fame in 1982. Crystal of Storms was part of a revival of the Fighting Fantasy books by Scholastic Books that began in 2017, one of six new books published along side new editions of the classic ones.
  • Gabrielle’s previous seven books are:
    • The Alfie Bloom trilogy: Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle (2015), Alfie Bloom and the Talisman Thief (2016) and Alfie Bloom and the Witch of Demon Rock (2017)
    • The three Knights and Bikes books: Knights and Bikes (2018), Knights and Bikes: Rebel Bicycle Club (2019) and Knights and Bikes: Wheels of Legend (2020)
    • The first Rani Reports book, Rani Reports on the Missing Millions (2023)
  • The second Rani Reports book is due to be published on 5 September 2024, and currently available info lists the title as Rani Reports on the Copycat Crimes.
  • “Frou-frou” is term derived from French (originally the sound of a rustling bag), which has become British slang meaning overly ornamental or excessively fancy. (A famous example is the character Le Comte de Frou Frou from Blackadder the Third.) Frou-frou flavoured coffees might therefore include a pumpkin spice or salted caramel latte. We’ve no objection to any of this, by the way; enjoy your coffee any way you like! (Ben’s partner often has a bit of cardamom mixed into her coffee, and uses a spiced drinking chocolate on top of the frothed milk for a cappuccino.)
  • Yorkshire Biscuit Tea is indeed a frou-frou flavoured tea, manufactured by the Yorkshire Tea company and marketed as tasting like “tea and biscuits”. They also have a “Toast & Jam” flavour, and both were at least temporarily available in Australia in 2023.
  • There are several official Discworld and Terry Pratchett websites:
    • terrypratchett.com – the main official source for Terry Pratchett news.
    • dunmanifestin.com – the site for Dunmanifestin, the company created by Terry and Lynne Pratchett to hold copyright for Pratchett’s work, and the official site for the Terry Pratchett estate. Dunmanifestin directly publishes deluxe editions of various Pratchett works, like the Ultimate Discworld Companion and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Good Omens.
    • narrativia.com – the production company that controls licensing rights for all Pratchett’s works since 2012.
    • discworld.com – an official Discworld shop, originally known as PJSM Prints, founded, owned and run by Sandra and Jo Kidby. They originally sold only Paul Kidby’s art prints, but have since expanded to many other Discworld items, notably special editions of the books. (Note that Paul Kidby also has his own website, paulkidby.com, and sells items based on his artwork there, too.)
    • discworldemporium.com – the Discworld Emporium is the other official Discworld merchandise shop, set up by Bernard and Isobel Pearson after they closed their first business, Clarecraft.
  • Geoffrey Swivel is, as mentioned, Tiffany’s apprentice in The Shepherd’s Crown. In the novel Geoffrey uses he/him pronouns, but also makes it clear he doesn’t think of himself as either traditional gender. This led Rhianna and Gabrielle to update Geoffrey’s pronouns to they/them for Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. We’ll leave any further discussion for our episode about The Shepherd’s Crown (and eventual return to Tiffany Aching’s Guide).
  • Spill words are a concept introduced in I Shall Wear Midnight. Mrs Proust, the city witch in Ankh-Morpork who runs Boffo’s Emporium, explains it to Tiffany: “A spill word is a word that somebody almost says, but doesn’t. For a moment they hover in the conversation but aren’t spoken”. We discussed them in #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No Eyes is Back”.
  • Annagramma is the conventionally attractive mean girl and presumptive leader of the coven of young witches introduced in A Hat Full of Sky. In Wintersmith she takes over the steading that belonged to Miss Treason; she is only mentioned in passing in I Shall Wear Midnight, and plays a very minor role in The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • You is the white kitten Tiffany gives to Granny Weatherwax in Wintersmith, described her as the daughter of “Pinky, the Widow Cable’s cat”. During research for Tiffany Aching’s Guide, Gabrielle connected this to Tiffany’s next book, I Shall Wear Midnight, where she tells her father about having to deal with a widow up near Slice who’d been dead two months, locked up alone in her house with her cats. The cats couldn’t escape the house and had started to eat her, including one who had a litter of white kittens in her bed…
  • Granny Whitlow is the witch who built the gingerbread house in the Forest of Skund, as depicted in The Light Fantastic. Rincewind and Twoflower are led there by the gnome Swires when they need food, and steal Whitlow’s broomstick, which has handlebars, to escape the wizards sent to capture them. According to Swires, Whitlow herself hasn’t been seen in a long time, rumoured to have been “done up good and proper by a couple of young tearways”. This is usually interpreted as a version of the story of Hansel and Gretel.
  • Marchessa is a young Krullian wizard who appears in The Colour of Magic, in the final book, “Close to the Edge”. She describes herself as a wizard of the fifth level, and wields Ajandurah’s Wand of Utter Negativity when taking Rincewind and Twoflower captive so they can be sacrificed. She is well informed about Rincewind’s history.
  • Mistress Pullunder and Old Mother Dismass are mentioned briefly as Tiffany’s previous mentors at the start of Wintersmith. Dismass also appears during the sabbat at the start of Witches Abroad with Granny, Nanny and Gammer Brevis, discussing the shortage of young witches in the wake of Desiderata Hollow’s death. Her oracular ability causes her attention to wander backwards and forwards from the present moment in a manner not dissimilar to Mrs Cake. We discussed Witches Abroad way back in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumkinmobiles”.
  • The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast is a 1974 concept album (and 1975 rock opera) written primarily by Welsh musician Roger Glover, best known as a bassist and member of Deep Purple. The album, credited to “Roger Glover & Guests”, features Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath fame) and Micky Lee Soule, who was in the band Rainbow with both Dio and Glover. The album is based on the 1972 children’s book which Gabrielle mentions: The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast by Alan Aldridge and William Plomer. The book is itself based on an 1802 poem written by English banker, lawyer, abolitionist and Member of Parliament William Roscoe (1753-1831). The song Ben mentions is called “Love is All”, sung by Dio, and written by Glover, Dio and Eddie Hardin; it’s the nineteenth track, the second-last of the album. It was a number one hit in a few countries in Europe on release. Ben is probably incorrect about the music video being part of a larger animated film project, but it was definitely a hit on television: in Australia the song also made it into the top 10 in 1980 when the video was played on the music programme Countdown, and remained a frequently shown clip on the ABC for many years. It was also played regularly in France and some stations in the US, and featured in a 2021 trailer for French jeweller Cartier.
  • The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force is Star Wars book written by Daniel Wallace, and first published in 2010. Similarly to Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, it’s presented as an in-universe book – though in this case a specific copy of the third edition training guide for Jedi, which has been owned or used by several Jedi characters from the films who leave notes and other marks on the book. It survived the destruction of the Order, and was eventually being given to Luke Skywalker, it’s “owner” at the time it was published. The original edition was inside a “Vault”, but it has been re-published several times since with some additional material added and minor corrections. A similar volume also by Wallace, Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side, was first published in 2012 and later bundled with The Jedi Path and then also with two similar books, The Bounty Hunter Code: From the Files of Boba Fett (2013) and Imperial Handbook: A Commander’s Guide (2014). The most recent editions of all four were published by Chronicle Books in 2016.
  • Toggenburgs are a medium-sized purebred variety of goat originally from the Toggenburg region of the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. They’re very popular and farmed all over the world, known for their high milk production, though the UK has it’s own local breed, the British Toggenburg, recognised in 1921. Compared to the Pure Toggenburg, British Toggenburgs are bigger, heavier, have shorter hair and longer faces, a greater variety of coat colours, and make even more milk. One source we found described Toggenburgs as having a “robust nature” which makes them “a hardy goat able to look after its best interests,” which seems clear inspiration for the way goats are described in the Discworld books.
  • Indira Varma is a British actor best known to nerds for her screen roles in Game of Thrones, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Torchwood, though she’s done plenty of other film and television – and will appear in the upcoming 2024 season of Doctor Who as a Duchess. She has narrated all the Witches and Tiffany Aching books for the new Penguin Audiobooks series, which also feature Peter Serafinowicz as Death, Bill Nighy as the voice of the author reading the footnotes, and Steven Cree as the Nac Mac Feegle. The illustration of Miss Level inspired by her appears on page 31 of Tiffany Aching’s Guide, as well as in the collection of portraits used in the endpapers.
  • Joan Hickson (1906-1998) played Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple in the BBC television films adapting all twelve Miss Marple novels made between 1984 and 1992. She is the most recognisable screen version of the character.
  • Big thanks to listener armcie, who managed to uncover Nanny’s scribbled-out note on page 22 via some ebook jiggery pokery. According to them, the note reads:

Brings back a memory. Mr Ogg had a similar party piece, and after narry two sips of scumble, he’d get out his party piece and wave it around, we did all laugh, though we’d all seen it plenty before.

Nanny Ogg, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch
  • Tiffany’s favourite word being susurration is another classic bit of Terry re-using something he’d already written – in this case, his own answer to the question which he wrote for The Word, a publication for London’s Festival of Literature in 2000, three years before the publication of The Wee Free Men. In his introduction to the piece, he says these sorts of questions are referred to as “My Fabourite Spoon” items.
  • Fecund means “very fertile”, and – like so many other English words – comes from the Latin (fecundus, “fertile”) by way of French.
  • Crepuscular is an adjective meaning “of or resembling twilight”, but is more often used in its zoological context, where it means “active and dawn and/or dusk”, describing animals which are not diurnal (active during the day) or nocturnal (active during the night), but which inhabit the edge in between. A fitting word for a writer of edge witches!
  • The Overlord series are videogames published by Codemasters and originally developed by Triumph Studios. In the games the player is “the Overlord”, the new incarnation of evil who resembles Sauron from Lord of the Rings, who must vanquish the heroes who defeated the previous incarnation to regain enough strength to again conquer the land. Initially too weak to fight on their own, the Overlord instead commands a small army of goblin-like “Minions” who come in various colours with different special abilities. The games are a dark comedy, and the first game particularly parodies Lord of the Rings, with the heroes who are the player’s enemies parodying various members of the Fellowship, but later games include other fantasy elements as well, notably . The games in the series are:
    • Overlord (2007) for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
    • Overlord: Raising Hell (2008); an expansion for Overlord.
    • Overlord II (2009); a sequel to the original games for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
    • Overlord: Dark Legend (2009); an Overlord II spin-off for the Nintendo Wii developed by Climax Action.
    • Overlord: Minions (2009); an Overlord II spin-off for the Nintendo DS, also developed by Climax Action.
    • Overlord: Fellowship of Evil (2015); a for the XBox One, PlayStation 4 and PC (developed in-house at Codemasters)
  • Gnarl is the older minion who advises the new Overlord, and also does most of the narration for the player, since the Overlord themselves is a non-speaking character. He is played by Marc Silk, a prolific English voice actor who you’ve probably heard in something. He’s been Bob the Builder and various Danger Mouse characters, and been in some other classic videogames including Black & White and the Two Point series of sim games.
  • Knights and Bikes is a 2019 videogame designed by indie company Foam Sword, which was formed by developers who had previously worked at Media Molecule on games like LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway. It was originally a PlayStation 4 exclusive but was later released on the XBox One and Nintendo Switch. The game is set on the small (and fictional) British island of Penfurzy in the 1980s, and one or two players control Nessa and Demelz, two young girls who explore the island on their bikes and have fantastic adventures inspired by films like Goonies.
  • Adventure games are traditionally ones in which the player must navigate a story by examining their environment, talking to other characters and collecting and using objects to solve puzzles. The original text adventure games used typed commands, but in the 1990s companies like Sierra On-Line and LucasArts transitioned the genre into graphic or point-and-click adventures. These used graphics, sound and more-and-more sophisticated mouse-based interfaces to place the emphasis on the puzzles and their narrative solution instead of how to tell the game what you wanted to do, though some – including the original Discworld adventure game – were still very difficult. Telltale Games was a games development company founded in 2004 by ex LucasArts employees who developed a serialised, episodic format for adventure games. They started out making new stories featuring characters from the old LucasArts games, then moved on to using licensed characters and worlds like Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Walking Dead and the comic book Fables, which produced one of their most critically acclaimed games, The Wolf Among Us. The company collapsed in 2018 after revelations of extreme “crunch” culture – punishing hours and conditions for staff under pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines, something common in the videogame industry but at an extreme at TellTale. The name is now owned by a different company, LCG Entertainment, who re-released the TellTale Batman games and is working to complete a sequel to The Wolf Among Us.
  • The Quarter Quell is an event in The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and their film adaptations. In the future dystopia of Panem, the government responds to an attempted rebellion by instigating the “Hunger Games” – an annual lottery where a boy and a girl are selected from each of the twelve Districts as “tributes” who will fight to the death in a specially designed arena. The Games are televised, and each twenty-five years since the original they do a special “Quarter Quell” in which the usual rules are bent in some way; during the second novel, President Snow uses the 75th Hunger Games to bend the rules and make the protagonist Katniss fight again, something that is usually forbidden.

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.

#Pratchat74 – Hogswitch

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In this very special Hogswatch-adjacent episode of Pratchat, Liz and Ben don’t discuss a Terry Pratchett book! Instead, they interview Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent, authors of Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch.

Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch is a new lavishly illustrated guidebook to witchcraft, compiled by the famous young witch of the Chalk – with a little help from her friends, of course. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Miss Tick, Mrs Letice Earwig and more have all annotated the manuscript – as have Tiffany’s fairy allies and protectors, the Nac Mac Feegle.

We’ll return to the book for a regular discussion in a future episode, but for now, please enjoy our chat with Rhianna and Gabrielle – though note that as Tiffany Aching’s Guide is set after The Shepherd’s Crown, you might catch a couple of brief spoilers for the final Discworld novel in this interview. The same is true for their previous appearances on our spiritual sibling podcasts, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography, which you will probably also enjoy.

You can send us comments and questions about this episode using the hashtag #Pratchat74. And as usual you can find errata and other notes for this episode on our website.

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Guest Rhianna Pratchett is a writer best known for her work in videogames, most famously the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, and most recently Lost Words: Beyond the Page with Sketchbook Games. Rhianna also works in film and television production, and since 2012 has co-run Narrativia, the company which manages Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. Rhianna recently made her first podcast series, Mythical Creatures, for BBC Radio 4; find it via your favourite podcast app, or on the BBC Sounds website. You can also follow Rhianna on social media at @rhipratchett on Twitter and Mastodon, and as @rhi.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Guest Gabrielle Kent is now best known as a children’s author, but worked in videogames as an artist and lecturer for many years. Her books include the Knights and Bikes series based on the videogame of the same name; the Alfie Bloom series about a boy who inherits a magical castle; and most recently Rani Reports, a series about a young aspiring journalist, co-written with her husband Satish Shewhorak. You can find out more about Gabrielle via her website, gabriellekent.com. Gabrielle is also on social media as @gabriellekent on Twitter and Bluesky.

Next month we get our game one again as we play and discuss the second published Discworld board game, Guards! Guards!, designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw of BackSpindle Games. Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat75, or send us an email at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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