I was recently contacted by a nice fellow referring to himself as Horace Worblehat (don’t get too excited, other than being a hominid I don’t think he was in any way related to the Librarian), asking if it’d be alright for me to link to his website, where he shows off his My Own Creation LEGO builds of Discworld People, Places and …um, Penumbras???
I told him I could do one better than that, and if he was willing to put in a bit of effort then I’d be happy to showcase some of his works here on Clacks Header. He got back to me incredibly quickly, and I have failed, up until now, to sit myself in front of my computer and actually get the article loaded up and in front of an appreciative audience.
If you wish to find out more about the pseudonym’d Professor (I presume) Worblehat, then you can take go browse through the following links, after you’ve read what he wrote, below.
@HWorblehat on Instagram
L-Space on Facebook
L-Space on Flickr
The Discworld and I
Or: How I came into contact with Terry Pratchett’s books and started building my own LEGO Discworld.
The first book in the Discworld series I ever read was Pyramids. I received the book as a gift sometime in 1997. As I often do with books, if I like it; buy the rest. And so my Discworld collection began to grow. Purchasing now started from number one until I caught up and could follow the pace of the release of the new books.
That went well until I became increasingly impatient and thought it took too long for a new book to be translated. Then I first started reading them in English to satisfy my addiction (Ed. Note: If I could write as well in dutch as Horace can in English, then I’d probably be living in Leiden and call myself Daan).
In the meantime, the rediscovery of LEGO also started in 1999 with the release of the first Star Wars sets. After building some Star Wars MOCs, the idea came to do something with the Discworld.
My first Discworld MOC was a small version of a City Watch house sometime in early 2009. Compared to my current build style I find it rather primitive myself but we all have to start somewhere. Not much later I got the idea, inspired by the Unseen University Cut-Out Book, to recreate the entire Unseen University. The first MOC from that project was the River Wall, which saw the light of octarine in the summer of the same year.
The thought was that in a few years I would have finished the entire university, to be able to show at Discworld conventions or LEGO related fairs and spread “the Word” of Terry Pratchett there. That was a bit disappointing. After all these years it is still not finished and there are plans to rebuild the whole thing into a new system to make it easier to transport and install.
One idea leads to another and so I jump like a little kitten from one ball of wool to the next. It ranges from buildings in Ankh-Morbork to scenes on the street. A project for an exhibition in the City Museum of Vianen, the City Gate, led to the City Wall project, in which I try to integrate real structures that existed on and around the city walls in the Middle Ages into my version of Ankh-Morpork, which has since been renamed Brick-Morpork. Here too I try to make a link with the Discworld, such as the Troll Gate, where the Silver Horde is also present.
The city wall and the buildings, with the exception of the University, are separate modules that can be combined and placed in all sorts of ways. As a result, the structure of the city is different every time, and it stores a bit better. The parts that really come from the books are easy to recognize by the Feegle that I hide in them.
Another important part of my Lego Discworld hobby is recreating the characters (see Chelonaut Rincewind and Nanny Ogg for example) in minifigure format. I don’t pretend to have the only correct representation but I go by examples from Paul Kidby and Josh Kirby and what I read and feel about a certain character. Everything within the limitations that the different parts offer me. For each character I make a break-down of the parts on my website.
I try to propagate this (in)complete mix of LEGO and Discworld through my own website in Dutch and English. Hopefully someone will get a little inspiration from this or discover something new in this way. The website also has its own project; the footnotes*. There is a lot of humor hidden at the bottom of the page and I thought it was only fair to give this neglected part of Pratchett’s writings a little more attention. Looking it up and retyping it is also a nice excuse to go through the books again (Ed. Note: Like you need an excuse!!!).
* The footnotes are on the frontpage and each individual book page, showing one at a time. So please be patient**, or feel free to keep returning.
** They are on a timer, but appear at random so it may take a while.
There are plenty more ideas waiting to take up my free time. So I’m not under the illusion that I will be finished with them in the near future. There is enough to keep me going for several years to come.
Clacks Header 
Leave a comment