A setting with no canon

[Dykstrav]

Wow, that's... hard-core. I think that might take it further than would be useful to a GM. Certainly it would make the Great Hundred go over length.

There's a design issue you have to keep in mind. You should probably present the material without a statement of canonicity, but still somewhere in the back of your process, have what you want to be canon decided. Then it's just a process of presenting different viewpoints that explains how something works or came to pass.

I quoted an example from the old World of Darkness material earlier because it's truly superlative to D&D in this regard. Unlike, say, the Manual of the Planes or Fiendish Codex I, their product lines rarely presented anything as absolute, solid cosmic truth that the players had access to. Vampires drank blood and came out at night and had supernatural powers- everything beyond this was conjecture and hearsay, often colored by generations of mythological comparisons, religious/political ideology, and good old-fashioned ignorance and bigotry. The very lack of canonicity could be said to be at the core of Mage: the Ascension, where magi fought one another because they couldn't even agree with each other on the nature of reality and other abstract concepts.

This is the basic approach that I take to my own homebrew. Knowledge (history) checks rarely give you one straight answer, for example, because different historians gave differing accounts on events that they might have even witnessed personally.

 

[Ry]

There's a design issue you have to keep in mind. You should probably present the material without a statement of canonicity, but still somewhere in the back of your process, have what you want to be canon decided. Then it's just a process of presenting different viewpoints that explains how something works or came to pass.

Since it's a community project, we tend to discuss that kind of thing in the Talk pages, and we have this long discussion about the big hitter of the setting and what their role is, how much room we can leave, and so on. That helps us stay consistent.
[sblock=for dykstrav]BTW, if you take this approach in your campaign, would you have any ideas you could give to the Great Hundred? There's no exclusivity requirement.[/sblock]

 

[Faraer]

There's not going to be any "canon", really, because everything comes from someone's perspective, and they could be wrong.

I just thought that was cool. Has anybody else done this?

Two people who have are Gary Gygax, whose World of Greyhawk boxed set is an in-world document, and who disdains the notion of a fixed 'canon', and Ed Greenwood, who writes about the Realms through explicit or implicit unreliable narrators, and opened the DM's Sourcebook of the Realms with a reminder not to take the book as 'gospel' for your campaign.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I just thought that was cool. Has anybody else done this?

It's interesting but I don't go so far to justify myself. I adhere to the Judges Guild philosophy regardless of the setting I'm using - once it is in the hands of the DM it is the DM's right, maybe even responsibility to add, delete, or alter ANYTHING about the setting.

Canon in RPG's only exists for fanatics to argue over. Real gamers take what they want and leave the rest because they know the actual successful gameplay of an RPG does not rely on adherence to canon (in fact it often improves when it's spited). Let publishers present whatever they like - I'll still consider it only a starting point.

 

[Dr Simon]

Two people who have are Gary Gygax, whose World of Greyhawk boxed set is an in-world document, and who disdains the notion of a fixed 'canon', and Ed Greenwood, who writes about the Realms through explicit or implicit unreliable narrators, and opened the DM's Sourcebook of the Realms with a reminder not to take the book as 'gospel' for your campaign.

I'd add Greg Stafford to that list, since he keeps changing his mind about Glorantha. In fact, he even came up with an in-world explanation for this - the God Learners. Cosmic Truth in Glorantha is subjective - the dragonewts say one thing, the Orlanthi another and the Lunars yet another, each is a bit right, each is a bit wrong. The God Learners were a group of powerful magicians who started by cataoguing various myths and ended up trying to change them to conform to a nice organised ideal. In the end the universe didn't like this and they were destroyed.

In ex-game terms, this means that in makes it easy in a game of RuneQuest to assume similar game statistics for, say, a Fertility Goddess but this means that in the reality of Glorantha the goddess Dendara is *not* the same entity as the goddess Ernalda merely worshipped by a different name, and that assuming that they are (God Learner fashion) will end up with trouble.

 

[diaglo]

I've heard people get into arguments over what's canon and what's not, and something cool just occured to me.

A Canon is a 6th lvl cleric in 1edADnD.

 

[Dr Simon]

There's a design issue you have to keep in mind. You should probably present the material without a statement of canonicity, but still somewhere in the back of your process, have what you want to be canon decided. Then it's just a process of presenting different viewpoints that explains how something works or came to pass.

I absolutely agree with this - there are obviously degrees of canonicity (if that is such a word!) that you can adhere to.

To say that the God-King of City State Y is (a) a benevolent dictator, (b) an evil tyrant or (c) the puppet of extra-planar powers is one thing, but you have thereby established that there is a City State Y and that it is ruled by a God-King. You can't really allow *that* level of the setting to be subjective or it gets silly! So its impossible to create a world, I think, where the physicality is not canon (except for distant lands in travellers tale that may or may not exist).

Option C, by the way, does not mean that there *are* mind-controlling extraplanar powers, only that people in the setting believe in them.

 

[Ranger REG]

Right, but you can't publish your campaign w/o permission (or an adventure, or a novel based on your game, whatever).

Why would I want to do that? :\

It's for my own group, not anybody else.

 

[Ry]

Why would I want to do that? :\ It's for my own group, not anybody else.

Lots of DMs homebrew because they want the game to be "theirs" and find canon restrictive. I certainly do - and I like being able to drift back and forth between my game design, creative writing and my own campaigns. You don't have to feel the same way.

 

[Ry]

To say that the God-King of City State Y is (a) a benevolent dictator, (b) an evil tyrant or (c) the puppet of extra-planar powers is one thing, but you have thereby established that there is a City State Y and that it is ruled by a God-King. You can't really allow *that* level of the setting to be subjective or it gets silly! So its impossible to create a world, I think, where the physicality is not canon (except for distant lands in travellers tale that may or may not exist).

I agree with this.

If you use a fragment of the Great Hundred that talks about City State X being ruled by overlord Y, the only way you can get away with that being wrong is if it's very far away: I.E. if someone was using the Great Hundred to handwave "and there's that continent over there, here's some scraps of myth about it."