The Discworld in LEGO. A long time running project occasionaly interupted by builds in other themes.
Patrician
The Patrician, Havelock Vetinari
SI NON CONFECTVS, NON REFICIAT. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
Havelock Vetinari is the current Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. He has been the supreme ruler for some years and is the successor of Mad Lord Snapcase.
It was his discovery that people only really want stability and that tomorrow should pretty much resemble today, and this has been his greatest contribution to Ankh-Morpork. Impressively, he manages to keep this up even while he drags Ankh-Morpork, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future.
Several of his abilities (an absolutely photographic memory, the ability to solve puzzles almost instantly and an apparent inability to get drunk) suggest he may not be entirely human. This might explain his relationship, if any, with Lady Margolotta.
The Patrician is the ruler (read: “dictator for life”) of Ankh-Morpork since the end of the monarchy, with the death of King Lorenzo the Kind at the hand of “Stoneface” Vimes, then commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and ancestor of Samuel Vimes. In absence of a monarch, the Patricians have inherited the right to create lordships.
They believed in the principle of “one man, one vote” (as in, “I am the Man, I have the Vote”).
Ankh-Morpork's enviable system of licensed criminals owes much to the current Patrician, Lord Vetinari. He reasoned that the only way to police a city of a million inhabitants was to recognize the various gangs and robber guilds, give them professional status, invite the leaders to large dinners, allow an acceptable level of street crime and then make the guild leaders responsible for enforcing it, on pain of being stripped of their new civic honours along with large areas of their skin. It worked. Criminals, it turned out, made a very good police force; unauthorized robbers soon found, for example, that instead of a night in the cels they could now expect an etenity at the bottom of the river.
Hoewever, there was the problem of apportioning the crime statistics, and so there arose a complex system of annual budgeting, chits and allowances to see that a) the members could make a reasonable living and b) no citizen was robbed or assaulted more then an agreed number of times. Many foresighted citizens in fact arranged to get an acceptable minimum of theft, assault, etc, over at the beginning of the financial year, often in the privacy and comfort of their own homes, and thus be able to walk the streets quite safely for the rest of the year. It all ticked over extremely peacefully and efficiently, demonstrating once again that compared to the Patrician of Ankh, Machiavelli could not have run a whelk stall.Wyrd Sisters, p. 227
'No unlicensed thieving, surely?' he said.*
One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves' Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid job protection. Thus in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorized crime was met with the full force of Injustice, which was generally a stick with nail in it.Guards! Guards!, p. 44
...apart from anything that threatened the city*,
And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.Guards! Guards!, p. 78
The Patrician didn't believe in unnecessary cruelty.*
While being bang alongside the idea of necessary cruelty, of course.Guards! Guards!, p. 86
several human bucket chains [...] to the stricken building.*
The Guild of Fire Fighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients' houses in groups, making loud comments like 'Very inflammable looking place this' and 'Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?'Guards! Guards!, p. 103
...and he [the Patrician] might have to have someone killed one day, although it would be with great reluctance.*
On his part, that is. Their reluctance probably goes without saying.Moving Pictures, p. 279
Till pork exists.*
Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician's rules about baseless metaphores, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it's as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futures - in pork that doesn't exist yet - led to the building of the warehouse to store it untill it does. The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in the temporal energy flow. At least, that's what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they've got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they're talking about.Men at Arms, p. 182
It was a lot easier, with rats.*
Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats - and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no-one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: 'Tax the rat farms.'Soul Music, p. 234
and moved his [Lord Vetinari] descending foot so that it landed on a stone that in every respect appeared to be exactly the same as its fellows.*
Except that the ones around it were not good stones to tread if it was a Tuesday.The Fifth Elephant, p. 77
What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,*
The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which seldom happened with the Iron Maiden.Making Money, p. 397
He was just staring at the crossword puzzle*
1 down: Shaken players shift the load (9 letters). Lord Vetinari had sneered at it.Making Money, p. 417
Ankh-Morpork's Royal Art Museum*
Technically, the city of Ankh-Morpork is a Tyranny, which is not always the same thing as a monarchy, and in fact even the post of Tyrant has been somewhat redefined by the incumbent, Lord Vetinari, as the only form of democracy that works. Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari.
And yet it does work. This has annoyed a number of people who feel, somehow, that it should not, and who want a monarch instead, thus replacing a man who has achieved his position by cunning, a deep understanding of the realities of the human psyche, breathtaking diplomacy, a certain prowess with the stiletto dagger, and, all agree, a mind like a finely balanced crcular saw, with a man who has got there by being born.†
However, the crown has hung on anyway, as crowns do - on the Post Office and the Royal Bank and the Mint and, not least, in the sprawling, brawling, squalling consciousness of the city itself. Lots of things live in the darkness. There are all kinds of darkness, and all the kinds of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden. Sometimes they escape. Sometimes they simply fall out. Sometimes they just can't take it any more.Unseen Academicals, p. 13
the Ankh-Morpork Trespassers' Society*
Originally the Explorers' Society until Lord Vetinari forcibly insisted that most of the places 'discovered' by the society's members already had people living in them, who were already trying to sell snakes to newcomers.Unseen Academicals, p. 72
Lord Vetinari stepped forward from the shadows in the room*
At least, that's where Moist assumed he'd come from. Vetinari was one of the greatest students of concealment the Assassins had ever produced, so it could simply have been a shadowy state of mind.Raising Steam, p. 334
Vetinari had been at his desk reading reports of what looked suspiciously to Moist like other people's clack messages.*
Although this accusation has never been levelled by anybody at his lordship, which is to say, none have been found.Raising Steam, p. 432
