It's his birthday today

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Right now, I'm listening to the Color of Magic, and frankly, I'm underwhelmed.

Please tell me it gets better. I fell in love with The Last Hero when I was a little kid, but somehow avoided touching any other books until now, and while I can respect that there's touches of genius here and there, so far the Color of Magic hasn't really ensnared me.

Our world is wrong, user.

I prefer the witches and the guards over Rincewind any day.

the first 3 are significantly lower quality then the rest. Mort is where they start to pick up and Guards Guards is where he really hits his stride. I recomend starting with either one of those or maybe even reaper man. advice I give to most people is skip the first 3, go back to them later if you feel like it for completions sake.

It's not fair. I hate Rowling so much.

alternatively if you like the rincewind character but just found the book a bit naff jump straight in at interesting times.

They're all pretty bad. The whole series can be summed up by:
>look at these self aware fantasy tropes!
>also everybody is dumb!
It's strange how part of Veeky Forums deifies him.

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I don't think Terry would want you to hate her user. If anything Harry Potter got kids into reading.
disclaimer: I do have a soft spot for Rowling, Azkaban was the first book I ever read by myself. Not sure if I would have gotten into my dad's pratchett and tolkien without her. She was also really nice when I went to a signing of the last one, took time to answer my dumb question and everything

Sure, there's a lot of "look at how clever I am" writing going on, but at the same time, there's a lot of clever writing.

The guy knew fantasy very well in order to parody it like he did. It's one of those things where a lot of the humor may be missed by people not familiar with the genre, and the more familiar you are, the more you grow to respect that this man was a man who, despite loving fantasy deeply, was bold enough to explore what would happen if you tried ripping pieces of it apart.

You're free to dislike his writing, you're free to dislike the writer, but you probably should show some respect at least to the fact that the books are overflowing with ideas that you're very unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

Well she isn't nice anymore. One look at her Twitter and she's a frothing at the mouth leftnut with all the smugness with it.

Color of magic is the first one, it's not really that good. The books get good with the ank-morpork stuff. The first Guards book is okay, but the series is great after that.

> being nice to an orc
that elf disgusts me

It's ok user, show us where the bad lady touched you

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>> being nice to an orc

And being nice to your food is bad because ... ?

Or were you actually thinking something else? It's not ruled out either.

I still haven't started the last Long Earth book, the Long Cosmos. I know it was a collaborative book with Stephen Baxter, and having read no other Terry Pratchett or Baxter I don't know how much of it is each author, but I dunno. The series still means something to me, one of the things that really pushed me into finally taking up blacksmithing, and somehow it feels like something will be gone if I finish that final book.

>you
>or your GM
>nicked stuff....for your games

LORD ALMIGHTY A LOT OF ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT HOW FORTUNATE I AM UP HERE

So this is the one where the illustrator literally thought twoflower had four eyes and not glasses.

I honestly don't know how he did it - the guy's english as well, it's not like it's a translation issue or a phrase people don't use

I'd like to think he was taking the piss intentionally. The alternative is to believe he really was that stupid.

It felt way more Baxter than Pratchett.

Are people who post about not having games in threads about having a game cucks?

We used to hang people for less than that

Sourcery to Making Money is the good stuff.

Yeah, there is also a part about the dwarfs plowing up the dancers with iron tools. Knowing what iron does to Elfs......

Nope - not enough of a punishment, I say.
Put 'im up as a personal assistant to Granny Weatherwax for a few days - let's see how he swims.

Well, i don't hate Rowling as much a you do. But look at it like this.

If you despise the HP franchise as much as you do rowling, and you love Sir pratchett as much as me, then are lives are infinitely richer than theirs, and their mourning is just a superficial jest aping the depths of emotion that you feel.

Personally i do not mind the Potterverse.

If you wanna go off the deep end my friend, imagine what the world will look like when Stephanie meyer passes away.

He'd probably just take his life
To another continent and be a reformed man.

As is being posted, most agree that it tends to pick up after the first three ones.

Me, i prefer all of them.

When i was younger the DEATH books were my favorite.

As a teenager there was the witches

as a twenty something, the guards men

Now i love all of them. But have a real soft spot for the witches.

One part of the allure is that they all have appeal regardless of what phase of my life i am in.

Whatever get's people to read i say :)

My first "real" book was reaper man. Freaked my native languages teacher right out of my mind, apparently nine year olds shouldn't be so hung up on death.

What really freaked her out was when she asked me if i though it was being clever reading an english book, apparently a hanging offence after the war, i looked her straight in the eye and said i was just studying for what was to come.

She went to have a quiet word with my mum' after that.

My mum' just said
"so that's who bloody well stole my discworld book"

The world is hopefully different now :D

Hmmm ... so: either a peasant in Counterweight or anything in XXXX ...

I'd stick with Granny if I was him ...

OTOH: are we talking Counterweight before or after Cohen? Actually, nevermind - scratch that - we're talking about Cohen, here ...

No' worries mate

have a tinnie

I grew up with Sir Terry. I have read every single one of his books, and own a good 4/5ths of them.
Why did he have to fucking go. Why did he have to get Alzheimer's.
Why him. Why my hero.

Happy birthday. I wish I'd had a chance to meet you, like I'd always wanted.

> Leftist used as an insult
> In a thread about Pratchett, who's about as liberal you can get without full SJW

>Discworld Elves are Charismatic Murderhobos who make humans want to suicide simply by radiating some glamour and when that fails they go full sadist on you.

Well at least Terry doesn't have a reputation of stealing his work from his divorced spouse.

Apparently Rowlings ex-husband actually wrote Harry Potter as a tabletop game manuscript and left it hanging in a folder on his PC.
She took it , edited it just a bit and sent it to a publisher.
Later on they went to court for it and he got a few milions of settlement out of it to keep quiet.

huh - I always thought they go full sadist on you period ... oh, and you bend over because glamour, of course.

Just imagine being an average Joe walking down the street when sudently some buff pointy-eared hunk shows up in front of you and continues to flex his perfectly sculpted muscles and wiggle his shlong in front of you to the point of you wanting to let your self get killed out of sheer sense of inferiority.

>wtf are you gay or something?

A gorgeous Princess is walking down the street.
Not gorgeous really - that's an understatement of the millennium - more like goddess to the goddesses.
There will be no other women like her - like there weren't any before.
All you want to do is make her happy - do something that makes her smile.
Something like ... jumping in front of a bus!
Yeah, that's a good one!
Boy, is she gonna laugh for sure - and she'll notice you, too.
And you better do it right now, too - before any other schmuck thinks of the same thing - or she'll be laughing at him instead of you.
You want her to laugh at you, don't you, user?
I mean, you're not fit for anything else, really ...

I'd still argue mort is in with the good stuff, and while the last arching book wasn't great on the whole it was worth it for granny wetherwax's death, you could feel how much effort had gone into writting that well even with the altzheimers, it felt like the old terry again

I didn't really feel Mort when I read it, which is why I didn't put it in there.

I met my ex girlfriend due to a shared Pratchett reference I offhandedly threw into a conversation. We were together for 6 years and I always meant to write to him to thank him for bringing us together.

Then we broke up and I forgot about it. Then he died.

Don't mind me, I'm just going to fucking shoot myself.

Would Sir Terry want you to shoot yourself, user?

I'd had the amzing maurice read to me as a kid but i'd only gotten into the main series a couple of years before he died. I'd finished night watch about a week before he died.

I could remember sobbing quietly in my dorm room when the news came in. I held it in at first, but the final measage with the black sands of death broke the dams.

Though honestly, it was more saddening to read his newer books and notice, really notice, how his mind's slipping.
I've gotten around in reading Dodger recently and the writing's starting to get repeatitive, as if PTerry forgot that he already mentioned that bit several times. Normally I could read those books in one sitting, but that I ended up putting down.
You -knew- it's not his fault that his writing isn't as gripping as it used to be, and that's the most painful part.

I was able to sit down and read the entirety of "Men at Arms" in one day last weekend. It was pretty fucking comfy.

Yeah, you could also see his allegories getting a damn sight less subtle, and the villains far less complex.
Like how Albrecht in the fifth elephant was painted as a villain, then the King tells Vimes that, despite his anti Ankh Morpork views, he's still a good and honourable dwarf who just happens to have different values.

To contrast, I don't even remember the villain from Raising Steam

Y'know what, let's see what's Veeky Forums's taste on Discworld books.

Top 5 favourite Discworld books, go!

>hard mode: no Small Gods and/or Night Watch (y'know, to give the rest a sporting chance)

Mine will probably be Reaper Man, Pyramids, Lords and Ladies, Feet of Clay and Thud. Thud gets the top spot, but the rest are in no particular order.

Albrecht Albrechtson wasn't really a villain as such. He hated Ankh-Morpork and was very fundamentalist in his beliefs but he could have spat that piece of the Scone out and declared it as so much plaster dust and tipped Rys Ryson off of the throne.

But he didn't. It was the thing and the whole of the thing.

He wanted what was best for dwarfdom, he saw dwarfdom as needing another civil war much less than it needed him as king.

If he was a Villain it was very subtle.

But yes. Contrast that with Rust Jr from Snuff.

Forgot to add, that ranking was on hard mode. I'd slot both above Thud otherwise.

>just five
That's hard. Going Postal probably takes top spot for me, with Thud, Guards Guards, Men at Arms, Monstrous Regiment, Making Money, and The Truth all in a roughly equivalent blob around second.

Well shit, Snuff and Raising Steam were pretty keen on hammering the ideas in. While social commentary has always been a part of Discworld books, it never became -that- blatant until the recent books.

Hard mode:
>Soul Music
>Reaper Man
>Interesting Times
>Hogfather
>Jingo

>Albrecht
>villain

I thought Wolfgang and the rest of Angua's family were the villains?

It could be worse, I could have asked you guys to rank the characters.

Reading those books, along with the Long Earth series, I got the impression that Pterry just couldn't muster up the same bleak, cynical, rage-against-the-dying-light world of his earlier work. In the older books, the good guys win, but it's always close, always a hard-won thing. The dividing line between good and evil was always blurry, it's treacherously easy to be bad, and so desperately hard to be good.

The later books, by contrast, feel like they let the characters off lightly. The Long Earth especially, is basically one big utopian travelogue. It has a lot of cool ideas, but there's almost no real conflict or drama to be had. The High Meggas - the older short story that The Long Earth series was based on - is a much better narrative. But it's also much more grim, paranoid and cynical.

It really does feel like Pterry just wanted to send his characters off with happy endings, tone and versimilitude be damned.

I'm not sure m8.
Take Vimes for example, arguably his arc reached the darkest with Night Watch and Thud, even though both of them are from the later books.

I'll give you Snuff, at least.

Remind me, when was Maurice and the Educated Rodents released? For a book written for children, it's pretty damn good.

That's why I said painted as a villain.
Vimes has that image in his head, but the truth is he's just different.

Sauce
NOW

>Apparently
Sounds like the kind of thing you read on websites with names like omgnews.net and realfacts.biz and a "source" url that sends you back to the original article.

If you've got some decent links I'm all ears though.

In no particular order.

>Reaper Man
>The Amazing Maurice and his educated rodents
Sort of counts.
>The Last Hero
>Thief of Time
>Small Gods
Not gonna bother with Hard mode. It's too good to leave off.

Will playing a Dragon Age one shot, our PC's,two templars and two mages went to a bar.
The elf was fed up with our quest, which was to uncover a clandestine slave trading in the city but she was also tired of the mages shenanigans (they tried to steal the vial of their blood I had, as it allowed my character to track them down if they escaped, they failed to steal it from me) and she asked the bartender their strongest drink.
The DM described the bartender pouring a single drop of liquid in a wooden goblet, the elf had to make a roll to see if she could take it without fainting but she manage to pass it.
I only learned later by reading Mort that it was a reference to the Scumble Cider, it was a very fun moment during the session, as where the players interaction.

>Hard mode
Jesus

If you can't have Night Watch, well Thief of Time is concurrent at least
Lords and Ladies, my favourite Witch book
Pyramids is pretty great
Reaper Man/Soul Music/Hogfather togther tell a great story (and Mort's not far behind)
And Interesting Times is probably my favourite Wizard one

Never. He's a hack and not worth stealing for a game.

Oh, forgot Men At Arms as well. Though Jingo is about as good...

And due to reading it first and them being VERY similar I have a soft spot for Making Money over Going Postal.
And sometimes I think I'm the only person who liked Unseen Academicals

>/pol/ shitter

get back in your containment board right now

>no Night Watch or Small Gods

Well, okay then I guess.

Lords and Ladies
Carpe Jugulum
Pyramids
Reaper Man
Thud!

I really like the Vampires in Carpe Jugulum, trying to train themselves out of the cliche weaknesses. The thing I appreciate most in Pratchett's works is the humour, where the world-building is good enough that even when he pokes fun at it the stories still work.

Oh, and as the son of a police officer the Guard books, especially Night Watch hit pretty hard.
Small Gods is great for it's portrayal of religion, sensitively handled but still parodic and the others are up there because I like ancient Egypt and the character of Death.

Yeah, Small Gods is amazing.

Thud was also very heavy on the feels vis-a-vis Vimes and Young Sam, and done really well. Especially the home invasion. Brr

Pratchett's management of humour was great, even in heavy times - like when you realise that the discworld version of "oh Jesus" is "oh Brutha"

After cold war? It was published in 1991.
I am so confused

in no particular order reaper man, lords and ladies, the truth, men at arms, monstrous regiment

Good point
New one top 5 favourite charachers

>hard mode: only charachters that have been in only one book.

mine are vimes, wetherwax, ridcully Brutha and detritus.

for hard mode I'd say: Brutha, Sargent Jackram, the accountant who joins the watch in thud after he takes on the troll, windle poons and mr tulip

huh, well that was the wrong picture

the other one, the one where a bunch of countries where a bit miffed at english speakers for a while.

The one after the great war, which, apparently, was not all that great, as we had to do it again for some reason.

Pratchett's elves were the first stories that introduced me to the concept of oldschool fair folk. Most of my dmming attempts have crashed and burned because I suck at time investment. I did once use his elves as inspiration for a story arch in a cringy freeform rp I did as a kid though.

God, reading the archives of his memorial threads here still make me start to tear up. I don't think I'll ever forget that day. I found out on the way to class and wound up breaking down in the middle of lecture when I saw the tweets. In the second half of it the professor had everyone make small discussion groups, and the people I was sitting with must have been so confused.

Now that I think about it, the Long Earth and Dodger have been still sitting unread on my shelf back home ever since I got them as gifts a couple years ago. Never got around to it since I don't get much time for reading nowadays. They may not be the same as old PTerry, but I think I'm gonna see about going through them as soon as I can when I get home.

>windle poons
I'm pretty sure he's in more books than Reaper Man.

don't think so, he dies in reaper man, are you thinking of ponder stibbons?

He turns up in "Moving Pictures" actually, the wizards take him along to watch a film before everything goes crazy and reverse King Kong happens

He's in Moving Pictures.

fair enough haven't read that one in a long time. in that case swap him out for Om

Ridcully's my favorite, followed by Death, Sgt Colon, Legitimate First and Nanny Ogg.

Sounds like alt right BS to me.

There's been plenty of that shit over the years, m8, even before she stared being a bit daft on twitter, so it's no surprise rumours get started.

I think there was one guy who tried it on based on a character name and a magic school.

Given that she submitted the book in 1997, before everyone had personal computers
and she submitted a manuscript done by type writer, I'm pretty sure it's all bollocks.