Guards! Guards!

Terry Pratchett

4 ideas

1. Secret society summons dragon, loses control

   Lupine Wonse, the Patrician's secretary, leads a disgruntled secret society, the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. They summon a noble dragon so that a staged 'rightful heir' can slay it and be crowned as their puppet, but the dragon kills the fake king, crowns itself, and the city quickly accepts its rule and even offers it virgin sacrifices. It is defeated not by a hero but by a handful of despised watchmen under the drunk Captain Vimes, with help from Lady Sybil's small swamp dragon Errol, and Carrot, the likely true heir, chooses to stay a constable.

2. Licensed crime turns criminals into regulators

   The Patrician legalizes the Thieves' Guild and gives it an annual quota of thefts and violence, so predictable, capped crime replaces random crime. Because the Guild's monopoly depends on the arrangement, it punishes unlicensed thieves more efficiently than any police force could. Its members' incentives now point toward keeping crime orderly rather than maximizing it.

3. Ordinary people enable tyranny, not villains

   The city bargains with the dragon within days. Tyranny therefore rests less on the tyrant's strength than on the easy compliance of the governed, who trade freedom for predictability.

4. Million-to-one chances succeed nine times out of ten

   The watchmen worry that making the odds merely 'thousand-to-one' would break the effect. The joke exposes how audiences judge plausibility by story conventions rather than by actual odds.

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