Welcome to Lancre -
Beware of the Troll!

Lancre is a tiny little kingdom literally cut into the side of the mighty Ramtops mountain range.  The Lancrastrians are mainly farmers or smiths, and their police force (Shawn Ogg), their castle caretaking staff (Shawn Ogg), and various other services like the Royal mail, the Customs and Excise, Royal herald, and the Committee to Design the Lancre Army Knife (all Shawn Ogg) are minute.  King Verence and Queen Magrat are doing their best to be modern and forward-thinking royalty, and try to encourage the people in proper farming methods and improving education, but Lancre's idea of a good king is a shouting individual who drinks a bit too much and is dangerous around young virgins.

   'A shorter fanfare this time, Shawn, I think,' said the King. 'While I personally appreciate your skill, an occasion like this calls for something a little simpler than several bars of "Pink Hedgehog Rag".'
   'Yes, sir.'
   'Let us go, then.'
   They went into the main passage just as Magrat's group was passing, and the King took her hand.
   Nanny Ogg trailed after them. The King was right, in a way. She did feel ... unusual, ill-tempered and snappish, as if she'd put on a vest that was too tight. Well, Granny would be here soon enough, and she knew how to talk to kings.

   You needed a special technique for that, Nanny reasoned; for example, you couldn't say things like 'Who died and made you King?', because they'd know. 'You and whose army?' was another difficult one, although in this case Verence's army consisted of Shawn and a troll and was unlikely to be a serious threat to Shawn's own mother if he wanted to be allowed to eat his tea indoors.

The Royal Falconer, Hodgesaargh, is one of my favourite characters. It's not that he's a bad falconer; he's really a very good falconer, except he's so single-minded that every bird he trains becomes such an incredibly good killing machine that it attacks everything in sight (i.e. usually Hodgesaargh. He can only go near the eagle, King Henry, in full armour.) Everyone doubts it's his real name, but it's the one he seems to give every time he's asked...

   She'd seen Hodgesaargh occasionally, around the edges of the woods or up on the moors. Usually the royal falconer was vainly fighting off his hawks, who attacked him for a pastime, and in the case of King Henry kept picking him up and dropping him again in the belief that he was a giant tortoise.

   It wasn't that he was a bad falconer. A few other people in Lancre kept hawks and reckoned he was one of the best trainers in the mountains, possibly because he was so single-minded about it. It was just that he trained every feathery little killing machine so well that it became unable to resist seeing what he tasted like.

   He didn't deserve it. Nor did he deserve his ceremonial costume. Usually, when not in the company of King Henry, he just wore working leathers and about three sticking plasters, but what he was wearing now had been designed hundreds of years before by someone with a lyrical view of the countryside who had never had to run through a bramble bush with a gerfalcon hanging on their ear. It had a lot of red and gold in it, and would have looked much better on someone two feet taller who had the legs for red stockings. The hat was best not talked about, but if you had to, you'd talk about it in terms of something big, red and floppy. With a feather in it.

Lancre has the highest per capita concentration of witches on the discworld;  her most famous witch is Nanny Ogg, author of The Joye of Snacks, which can be described as 'naughty'.  It could be described as worse things, but naughty I'll stick with. She forms part of a threesome (as in, "The Maiden, the Mother and the other one"; 'Crone' isn't a word you use around Granny Weatherwax if you want to stay human-shaped).  Nanny is matriarch of an enormous clan of Oggs who outnumber pretty much everyone in Lancre - her own standing army, which incorporates Lancre's army too, in fact (yup, Shawn Ogg again - unless he's sitting down), and it comes in useful when someone's been messing around with the fabric of reality.  Or inviting vampires into the kingdom, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  Her cat, Greebo, is the father, rapist or murderer of almost every other cat in the Ramtops.  A vile moggy with one good eye and a face like an old boot, he is still viewed by Nanny Ogg as a sort of Mr Fluffy;  the adorable kitten she fell in love with many years ago.  To everyone else he's a howl in the night and a claw in the shin.

Magrat has given up witching for queening. Admittedly the other witches see this as a demotion, but that's Granny Weatherwax's mindset for you - tenacious as a Lancre Blue-vein, which has to be nailed to the board to prevent it attacking all the other cheeses... She fell for the king at first sight - there was something about a man who tinkles gently when he moves...

   It was early morning in lancre town, and it was more or less deserted. Farmers had got up hours before to curse and swear and throw a bucket at the cows and had then gone back to bed.

Granny Weatherwax is Lancre's most dangerous witch.  She's the one who has kept out all the creatures who have threatened the Disc in her corner of the Ramtops, and even Trolls and dwarves aren't particularly keen to drop by her turf (her name in dwarfish means "Go around the other side of the mountain", dwarves being a very practical and, more importantly, intelligent sort of people).

And the third witch - once Magrat, before she married - is now Agnes Nitt. She really wishes she were someone thin, mysterious and elegant, like a Perdita.  Perdita X.  She can't really do anything about the Nitt.  But she can sing duets with herself - in fifths - and even did a stint in the Ankh-Morpork Opera House, which was quite enough excitement for one life-time, thank-you.  Now she's stuck back in Lancre as the Maiden, being bossed around by the Mother and the Other One... at least there aren't any midnight meetings, dancing around the fire naked. We all know what happened last time, after all.

   She placed the card on the black velvet cloth in front of her.
   Perdita looked at it gloomily. It was all very pretty, the cards were coloured like little pasteboard jewels, and they had interesting names. But that little traitor voice whispered: how the hell can they know what the future holds? Cardboard isn't very bright.

All quotations taken from Carpe Jugulum Terry Pratchett, 1998, Doubleday (Transworld Publishers), Suffolk.