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I can imagine Terry reading one of those eighties pulp fantasy novels as he was writing The Colour Of Magic rolling his eyes at all the over the top seriousness and by the end of both books he was like 'sod making fun of this, I'm going to make something better'.
SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 28, 2011 |
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Mar 28, 2011 15:20
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DontMockMySmock posted:"And what is at the end of the desert?" Happened with Granny in Witches Abroad too. Well, similar.
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Mar 28, 2011 17:51
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veekie posted:Happened with Granny in Witches Abroad too. Well, similar. I'm not a big fan of the witch books, but yeah that was pretty clever.
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Mar 28, 2011 18:02
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I read Small Gods again recently, for the first time in a decade, and I still absolutely love every part of it. Brutha is a great character. He's almost a completely different person by the end of the book, but he's still the same lovable, clumsy idiot that eventually dies face down in his breakfast. More than anything, though, the book is such a great bit of mythology about the Discworld. I think I love Night Watch for the same reason - it finally gives us some real, personal history about Ankh Morpork. We've heard bits about Winder and Snapcase but never exactly what they did, and we finally learn how Colon has been in the watch forever, well before Vimes was even a rookie, plus exactly what happened to Reg. Plus it's probably the only time I've ever felt bad about Nobby, when we find out that, as a child, his dad beat him and actually broke his arms. He's even terrified of prison, just because his dad might be there. I mean, there have been jokes about Nobby getting vomit in his Christmas stocking before, but that whole bit was a totally new level of  . Night Watch is probably my favourite book out of all of them.
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Mar 28, 2011 23:54
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President Anime 2008 posted:I read Small Gods again recently, for the first time in a decade, and I still absolutely love every part of it. Brutha is a great character. He's almost a completely different person by the end of the book, but he's still the same lovable, clumsy idiot that eventually dies face down in his breakfast. More than anything, though, the book is such a great bit of mythology about the Discworld. If you are feeling bad for Nobby man, I don't know how to react. He's a bastard. I mean, he is. I love him but he's corrupt as gently caress and a complete oval office.
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Mar 29, 2011 00:11
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Nilbop posted:If you are feeling bad for Nobby man, I don't know how to react. Well yeah, he is, but that was the moment he went from being a complete oval office to being a complete oval office who was probably only a complete oval office because he had a loving psychopath for a father. And is actually a lot wittier and more observant than people give him credit for. But perhaps only when compared to Colon, against whom a mute fruitbat could be considered perceptive.
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Mar 29, 2011 00:41
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President Anime 2008 posted:And is actually a lot wittier and more observant than people give him credit for. "Lyre"
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Mar 29, 2011 00:57
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I'm still amused that Nobby bankrupted a small european sized army by selling its own supplies to the enemy.
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Mar 29, 2011 02:04
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Just finished Small Gods and loved it.  Didn't really understand why Brutha died exactly 100 years after leaving the desert but oh well.
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Mar 29, 2011 06:57
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Hedrigall posted:Just finished Small Gods and loved it. Because he was old
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Mar 29, 2011 07:04
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I'm about halfway through Guards! Guards! for the first time. It's weird because I've read a bunch of other novels with Vimes & Co., like Thud! There's a lot of background and intro on all the characters that I've been missing out on for a while!
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Mar 29, 2011 07:28
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Quizitastrix posted:I'm about halfway through Guards! Guards! for the first time. It's weird because I've read a bunch of other novels with Vimes & Co., like Thud! There's a lot of background and intro on all the characters that I've been missing out on for a while! Vimes used to drink a lot, and the best thing about Vimesy is that this bothers him more than anything else, and I like to think it has at least something to do with the appearance of The Nightwatchman in Thud!
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Mar 29, 2011 07:43
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Nilbop posted:Vimes used to drink a lot, and the best thing about Vimesy is that this bothers him more than anything else, and I like to think it has at least something to do with the appearance of The Nightwatchman in Thud! I want to hope nothing bad happens to Lady Ramkin but at the same time I don't remember her from any later novels and Pratchett isn't the sort of guy to waste a character like her...
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Mar 29, 2011 07:50
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Hedrigall posted:Just finished Small Gods and loved it. Because his agreement with Om was to last a hundred years.
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Mar 29, 2011 08:40
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Cacto posted:Because his agreement with Om was to last a hundred years. Nah his agreement was that there would be no angry-god rah rah stuff for 100 years, nothing about Brutha dying? :\
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Mar 29, 2011 12:55
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Hedrigall posted:Nah his agreement was that there would be no angry-god rah rah stuff for 100 years, nothing about Brutha dying? :\ According to wiki: Om also agrees to forsake smiting of Omnian citizens for at least a hundred years. The last moments of the book see Brutha's death a hundred years to the day after Om's return to power and his journey across the ethereal desert towards judgement, accompanied by the spirit of Vorbis, who Brutha found still in the desert and took pity on. It is also revealed that this century of peace was originally meant to be a century of war and bloodshed which the History Monk Lu-Tze changed to something he liked better.
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Mar 29, 2011 15:01
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Alhazred posted:According to wiki: That doesn't answer my question unless you're implying that once the hundred years of no-smiting is up, Om decides his first smite of the day will be Brutha? And he wouldnt do that 
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Mar 29, 2011 15:42
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Quizitastrix posted:I want to hope nothing bad happens to Lady Ramkin but at the same time I don't remember her from any later novels and Pratchett isn't the sort of guy to waste a character like her... Oh, don't worry about that sort of thing believe me.
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Mar 29, 2011 15:43
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Hedrigall posted:That doesn't answer my question unless you're implying that once the hundred years of no-smiting is up, Om decides his first smite of the day will be Brutha? And he wouldnt do that I prefer to think that Om beat Death in a game to keep Brutha alive until after the bargain was completed, to keep him around as long as possible.
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Mar 29, 2011 15:55
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Quizitastrix posted:I want to hope nothing bad happens to Lady Ramkin but at the same time I don't remember her from any later novels and Pratchett isn't the sort of guy to waste a character like her... She features in all of the novels and in Night Watch is Vimes sole concern. I mean he buys Lawn an entire hospital just to make sure she's safe
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Mar 29, 2011 17:07
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Hedrigall posted:That doesn't answer my question unless you're implying that once the hundred years of no-smiting is up, Om decides his first smite of the day will be Brutha? And he wouldnt do that Dude has to die sometime, and with the hilariously literal versions of smiting used falling face-first into your morning porridge probably wasn't Om's work.
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Mar 29, 2011 17:19
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ibroxmassive posted:She features in all of the novels and in Night Watch is Vimes sole concern. I mean he buys Lawn an entire hospital just to make sure she's safe I think Thud! proves why you do not want to gently caress with Vimes' family.
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Mar 29, 2011 17:41
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Wait Lady Ramkin is Sybil. That just occurred to me! I guess it's another one of those things where she seems so different in this novel than in the others. In Guards! Guards! she's described as like eight feet tall, a paragon of noble breeding who cows men around her with a glance but who is also almost Aveline from Dragon Age when it comes to men. And since so few details were put forward for her in the later books I guess I just created another lady Sybil who was...very different!
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Mar 29, 2011 17:48
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Quizitastrix posted:Wait Lady Ramkin is Sybil. That just occurred to me! I guess it's another one of those things where she seems so different in this novel than in the others. In Guards! Guards! she's described as like eight feet tall, a paragon of noble breeding who cows men around her with a glance but who is also almost Aveline from Dragon Age when it comes to men. And since so few details were put forward for her in the later books I guess I just created another lady Sybil who was...very different! Because this how Vimes first see's her, not the actual person she really is later on in the series. You'll notice that as a character Vimes is very well aware of class lines and what he feels his place in them is. (If nothing else as a constant source of anger when nobility think they are above justice.) I really do like through how Vimes describes "The Voice of Nobility" (Carrot basically has it too) that gets every one to stiffen up for what ever is about to come next. BexGu fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 29, 2011 |
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Mar 29, 2011 18:30
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Re: Brutha, isn't there a line in there somewhere in the desert that goes "in a hundred years we will all be dead, but here and now..."? I thought that was why Brutha gives a little smile when he's told it's been exactly 100 years since the desert.
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Mar 29, 2011 19:47
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I've been wanting to buy some audio books with Discworld. The ones I see on iTunes are all by Tony Robinson, as far as I can see. How are they? Are there any I just have to buy?
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Mar 30, 2011 11:27
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Iacen posted:I've been wanting to buy some audio books with Discworld. The ones I see on iTunes are all by Tony Robinson, as far as I can see. How are they? Are there any I just have to buy? There are abridged and unabridged Discworld audiobooks on iTunes. The abridged versions are read by Tony Robinson, the unabridged versions are mostly read by Nigel Planner or Stephen Briggs. I have most of the abridged versions and listen to them regularly. I really like Robinson's characters (with the exception of Detritus in Moving Pictures, but he gives Detritus a better voice in the Watch series), although sometimes I can't help but hear Baldrick. You do miss out on a lot of the fine details of the books in the abridged versions; they are ~4 hours (for £8), compared to ~10 hours (for £12) for the unabridged, but I think they have done a good job in shortening them while keeping the book generally intact. It may be worth a trip to your local library as most county libraries have a selection of them on CD which would allow you to try before you buy.
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Mar 30, 2011 12:37
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I prefer Tony Robinson as well... Mostly because Nigel Planner can't do accents, which I found hugely distracting.
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Mar 30, 2011 13:34
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Hey fellow Pratchettheads I'm finishing Thud! within the next few days and have read through all of the Rincewind and City Watch books at this point (according to the L-Space list, with the exception of Unseen Academicals). I have absolutely adored the Watch books as everyone indicated I would and quite enjoyed pretty much all the Rincewind books as well. Question is, where to now? I have in my possession Equal Rites and Mort but don't know which would be better to start on. I do intend to read the books in their separate story arcs. Witches or Death?
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Mar 30, 2011 16:13
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Sammyz posted:Hey fellow Pratchettheads Death, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death. The Watch books are punchy and rich, with some of the best writing coming late in the series, but I think that the Death series showcase some of the finest moments of Pratchett's early-mid writing. All of his best characters tend to be the ones he's most obviously fallen in love with and, while he's been comfortably settled down with Vimes for some time now, Death was the early, bittersweet affair which still touches his newer writing from time to time. Another reason to put off the Witches series is that there are some reasonably strong parallels between one of the characters (Sam Vimes) in the early Watch books and another (Weatherwax) in the Witches - at least to my mind, other people might disagree. My gut just says that the two series will benefit from a little mental distance from each other.
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Mar 30, 2011 16:54
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I vote Death too. The ending of Mort is incredible.
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Mar 30, 2011 17:34
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SeanBeansShako posted:I vote Death too. The ending of Mort is incredible. Plus the Death arc has Reaper Man, the ending to that is better than the ending of Mort in my opinion.
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Mar 30, 2011 18:15
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Kismet posted:Death, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death. Death it is then! Also, I hadn't seen this posted in here so I thought I'd share http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91312/ankh-morpork For those of you not crosspolinating your geek with the boardgame crowd, that's being designed by Martin Wallace. Martin is A. British, and clearly knows and loves the source material from the early reviews of the prototype B. An incredibly well respected and prolific game designer This means that this is more likely to be an awesome game rather than one of the myriad of crappy media tie in roll and move boardgame trash.
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Mar 30, 2011 18:19
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Could we finally get to play Cripple Mr Onion? 
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Mar 30, 2011 18:21
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Sammyz posted:Also, I hadn't seen this posted in here so I thought I'd share As an avid board gamer, this sounds like a pretty good game without considering that it's based on Discworld. I haven't played any of Martin Wallace's other games, but I know of some of them. As an avid Pratchett fan, I am somewhat pessimistic about how well the setting will be conveyed through the game. But I'm still pretty excited about it. It's apparently releasing in October. That's too far away
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Mar 30, 2011 18:48
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DontMockMySmock posted:As an avid board gamer, this sounds like a pretty good game without considering that it's based on Discworld. I haven't played any of Martin Wallace's other games, but I know of some of them. This is apparently the lightest game Martin has ever designed which is a very good thing given the potential audience for this one. The entirety of the gameplay is accomplished by playing actions off of cards. Each card in the game is unique, and it's through those cards that a lot of the flavor of the world is captured. Each card has multiple actions that you can take, and occasionally some that you MUST take (such as Wizards doing something kooky). I'm quite optimistic based on what I've heard so far from fans who have played the prototype that it is going to do the setting justice. October is however too drat far away.
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Mar 30, 2011 18:53
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As a giant Pratchett geek and a giant board/card game geek, this makes me indescribably happy.
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Mar 31, 2011 11:33
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Here's a video of Terry at SFX magazine, talking about the Watch series with some of the people making it: http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/03/21/pratchett-exclusive/
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Apr 1, 2011 16:48
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Oh precious katana posted:Here's a video of Terry at SFX magazine, talking about the Watch series with some of the people making it:
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Apr 2, 2011 03:59
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My quest to read all the books consecutively hit a bit of a road-block with Pyramids. I loved the first part. I've been wanting an Assassins guild story for a while, but then just as it was getting good the book ditches all the interesting characters and goes back to the relatively uninteresting Djelibeybi where Teppic gets bossed around and complains a lot, and does gently caress all about it despite the fact that he's a King-God-Assassin. We're introduced to Dios who is a bit of a jerk, but apart from that isn't really "evil" and seemed to only have power because Teppic let him. Nothing happens for the next 150 pages, and there doesn't really seem to be any real driving force to the plot. Then Djelibeybi suddenly gets thrown into another dimension, which produces "mild-peril" for a bunch of characters I didn't really care about, and seemingly neither did Teppic. Then two countries that are barely introduced threaten to go to war, and then finally everything magically went back to how it was except Dios ended up in a time loop, which is fair enough I guess. The book had some fantastic jokes, particularly the bit about the riddle of the Sphinx, and there were a lot of clever observations about the real world, but overall I found the book really hard to get through because I think I felt like the book could have ended at any point and things wouldn't really have been that horrific for everyone involved. (Maybe it's just because 90% of Discworld books seem to have some kind of world-ending peril looming overhead). I'm a little worried because checking the reviews on goodreads, I seem to be fairly alone in my opinion, and a lot of people think that this book was the turning point at which the books got a lot better. Also googling for "Least favorite Discworld book" the few people that mentioned Pyramids also hated Small Gods, and with everyone raving about it for the last few pages I've been really looking forward to that book.
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Apr 2, 2011 17:14
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