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In light of all the well-reasoned and thoughtful responses like this one, I'm starting to think I should've called this thread "Whatever 'lore' is, it isn't 'rules' (except when it is)." :) There's something in my mind that still keeps me from seeing things like "a morningstar does 1d8 piercing...

Okay, let's spool this out to the end. And rather than a reductio ad absurdem thought experiment, I'm going to hold up my for-real, currently-in-progress home game as a subject to test your assertion. I run a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. As I mentioned upthread, I got buy-in before we...

First one I ever bought was Tomb of the Lizard King. I doubt I ever intended to actually run it; I wanted the ideas and the monsters. In fact, during my early RPG days, my circle was one that didn't go for premade modules at all, for whatever reason. I don't think we were philosophically...

I recall many, many years ago seeing Bruce Baugh (being descriptive, not judgmental) characterize most fantasy RPG settings as "the modern world in fairy-tale drag." I love that, and find that embracing it is incredibly freeing in how I approach setting.

Sod it all, Blue, it's no fair you come back showing yourself to be reasonable when we were in the middle of Someone Is Wrong on the Internet and all. Srsly, tho, that clarification is much appreciated. Thank you. I agree that's a useful and interesting thing to investigate. And I think I...

Certainly within your group you ought to come to agreements about the world you're playing in. But you only get to decide that for you and your table. You don't get to make sweeping pronouncements about what is and isn't "really" a given setting to the community-at-large, based on the criteria...

:D (I'm generally a Fripp/Gilmour/Gabriel/Belew kinda guy, but hey, if it's in a weird time signature and has at least one 15-minute track on it, it's probably okay by me.) Nostalgia's a powerful thing, both for the music and the games that imprinted on us early. My suspicion is that there...

Oh, absolutely. As a DM, I looooove players who are that engaged with the setting, and am loathe to discourage them. I suspect, if I were planning to use Beregost in a way that contradicted the lore, and players came to me with the stuff you're describing here, I'd think very carefully about how...

All this is pretty much why I give the side-eye to punk's fetishization of "authenticity" (and not just, as one might rightly infer from my handle, because I'm rather inclined to be aesthetically on the side of Bowie and Yes). There's the assumption that to be truly of value, a thing ought to...

And yet Sorbo's Herc was indeed Hercules to a great many people, whether your friend approved or not. Which is not the same thing as saying he ought to have enjoyed something for which he clearly wasn't the audience (and nor was I for that particular show). But none of us get to be the...

Okay, I follow you thus far. But I think the nature of your Spelljammer example is in some ways confusing the issue because of the nature of the setting. Spelljammer lore requires certain rules-like information that tells you what consditions are like for characters who are sailing between the...

You speak much truth. There's a heckuva lot of reductio ad absurdem going on over there. Indeed, my biggest objection to the idea of lore-as-rules is that it invites the false dichotomy that you must either accept it ALL WITHOUT EXCEPTION or THROW IT ALL AWAY.

Well, as I said above, isn't it enough to say that rules and lore inform each other without conflating them? The issue that I have with this terminology is that a "rule" can be broken. Lore, OTOH, may, depending on circumstances, be true and/or false and/or meaningless in any of several...

That's an especially interesting thing to bring up in this context, because from another angle "authenticity" is also one of the philosophical underpinnings of punk/DIY. And, IMHO, one of punk's more problematic aspects; indeed, it's one of the things that makes a certain subset of OSR folks so...

This strikes me as an enormously sane and reasonable way of threading the needle - indeed, though it's not the way I would have thought to put it, it pretty accurately describes my approach as well.

Maybe so. But without contradicting myself,* it seems to me they certainly ought to inform each other - though I would have thought it uncontroversial to suggest that they can do so without being mistaken for one another. *I am infinite, and so forth.

So like an idiot, I dipped into the last few pages of the Setting Canon thread, which seems to have long since gone off the rails, slipped the tracks, careened into the wilderness, and barrel-rolled two or three times before catching on fire and exploding. That said, though, something startling...

What I find most baffling is that so much of the demand for "official" product is coming from folks for whom it seems WotC hasn't done anything right since the launch of the edition. It's the RPG hobby's "the food here is terrible, and the portions are too small."* For this, I can only consider...

I'm not a teacher specifically, but I am a curriculum developer and instructional designer, and I find that the skillsets have a heckuva lot of Vennshare. (One of these days I'm going to finish my essay "Everything I Need to Know About Training I Learned as a Dungeon Master," if I can find...