Notable/Recurring
Characters

Lord Havelock Vetinari is the Lord Patrician (Primus inter pares) of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, and is the archetype of a benevolent dictator, in a chilly, inscrutable way. He is by far the most successful incumbent in the position to date, and his dedication to the city (albeit sometimes in unusual ways) means that for the first time anyone can recall, the city "just works". Although he is generally disliked as much as any of his predecessors, he has managed to arrange things in such a way that things are better with him as Patrician than someone else. Given the peculiarities of previous Patricians, such as Homicidal Lord Winder and Mad Lord Snapcase, Vetinari is unusually normal. An exception to this is his pathological dislike of Mime artists. On rising to power, he immediately banned them from the city, with anyone practicing Mime quickly finding themselves being hung upside down in the palace scorpion pits with "Learn the Words" written on the opposite wall.

He is described as a somewhat Machiavellian character, although his ideas of administration differ somewhat. He is tall, thin, and dresses entirely in black, as befitting his Assassin’s training. Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, states that he reminds him of a "predatory flamingo". Lord Vetinari's political philosophy can be summed up by his belief that, what people wish for most, is not good government, or even justice, but merely for things to stay the same. The Vetinari family motto is, after all, 'Si non confectus, non reficiat' ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it").

The Gods of the Discworld (those of note, in any case) live in Dunmanifestin atop the tallest mountain on the Disc, the ten-mile-high spire of Cori Celesti. It is here where they play games with the lives of mortals.

Gods are everywhere on the Discworld, a crucial element of the world's peculiar ecology that gives power to belief, and demands resolution to any and all narratives. Gods exist ‘in potentia’ in numbers uncountable, but the moment an event of any note occurs (say, two snails happen to cross at a single point) a god becomes tied to it and begins to manifest in the physical world. Most gods remain small and unknown, but a few come to the notice of humanity, whose belief then shapes and strengthens them until they gather enough power to join the Disc's vast, unwieldy pantheon.

Gods on the Discworld exist as long as people believe in them, and their power grows as their followers increase. This is a philosophy echoing the real-world politics of the power of religion, and is most detailed in the novel ‘Small Gods’. If people should cease believing in a particular god (if the religion becomes more important than faith) the god begins to fade, and eventually will "die", becoming little more than a faded, wispy echo.

The History Monks (also known as The Order of Wen the Eternally Surprised), are a Buddhist-like religious sect based in the Valley of Oi Dong in the High Ramtops. Their primary job is to ensure that time unfolds on the Disc as it should, and to see history follows the right track. History being set out in the huge lead-bound History Books (20,000 of them), each ten feet high, with printing small enough to need a magnifying glass to read. "When people say it is written, it is written here."

They have a number of methods for moving and storing time, for instance by means of spinning cylinders called procrastinators. Procrastinators look like Tibetan prayer wheels. As people’s perception of time affects its flow on the Disc, the Monks must ensure this does not become a problem by, for example, taking some time from the middle of the ocean ('how much time does a codfish need?') and putting it in a busy Ankh-Morpork workshop with a deadline to meet.

They also frequently need to enter the world to take a more direct hand in events. It is for this reason that a number of monks have been trained as ninja. Many of them have since been retrained by Lu-Tze, who believes most problems can be sorted out without resorting to martial arts.

Claude Maximilian Overton Transpire (CMOT) Dibbler is Ankh-Morpork’s most notorious, and perpetually failing, salesman. His nickname derives from his claims along the lines of "selling this at such a low price, that it's cutting me own throat". He’s always involved in whatever new fad might be coming through, be it moving pictures as a producer, or an agent for music-with-rocks-in. He’s very often reasonably successful at the time, but ultimately events conspire against him and he fails.

Dibbler’s default sales angle is being found in, or around, the city’s Sator Square, selling dubious ‘Sausage-Inna-Bun’ products, which can only be said to be made of materials that have been around pigs. Dibbler's sausages taste awful, but with a lot of sizzling onions and persistent price-cutting, Dibbler always manages to make a living by selling them to people that have prevoiusly gotten sick from eating them. This demonstrates that he's actually a very good salesman.

Suspiciously similar characters appear in several countries, all having a similar name and a nickname which describes self-harm. Several of these Dibbler-like salesmen have been encountered by Rincewind. When Rincewind meets a Dibbler-double, he ponders on the theory that there are only a small number of real people in the world, and the many people you meet are merely duplicates, which is why you seem to meet the same person all across the world.

The Librarian is faculty member of Unseen University (UU awards: DThau & Professor in L-Space Studies), and is also a 300 lb male orangutan. The Librarian appears in almost every Discworld book.

He was once a human, but a magical accident in ‘The Colour of Magic’ turned him into his current form, and events meant that the other Wizards never got around to changing him back. Having said this, the Librarian has taken great care to erase every record of him as a human, including references to his original name, to prevent this from ever happening. Although the senior Wizards looked very hard for one, there are no rules in the university constitution forbidding an orangutan from being a member of the college council. All the Librarian ever utters is 'oook' or 'eeek', but by now, the Wizards, and especially Rincewind, are so used to this that they understand the Librarian perfectly. They can even translate the merest 'oook' into full-fledged English sentences.

At Unseen University, promotion up through the Eight Levels of Wizardry has traditionally been via a method known as "Dead Men’s Pointy Shoes", and so makes being a senior wizard a rather precarious affair. Since the coming of Archchancellor Ridcully, however, the power structure has stabilised (mainly because nobody is able to murder him). The fighting changed from magical and murderous, to quarrels and minor insults between faculty members. Everybody is able to come down to the Great Hall alive and have a big dinner in relative calm (unless the Bursar is insane for the moment or there is a major magical disturbance in the vicinity).

Few faculty members like to teach. They have virtual lectures in a classroom (Room 3B) that does not exist; a happy arrangement mutually understood and respected by Faculty and students alike. The other lecture theatre specifically mentioned in the novels is Room 5B, which has its own issues, in that Space and Time have come adrift from each other, and a lecturer walking in might discover he is already there and has started taking a class twenty minutes previously.