Forgotten Realms: Do players care about canon?

[Voadam]

Cannon/Schmannon.

I've played in a spelljammer game where we arrived on Krynn and saw a red dragon toast a bunch of heroes who looked a lot like the companions of the lance.

I've played in a game where there was a word puzzle on this knowledge god's temple, to get out we had to get runes to spell out his name, "Omega" as the DM said for the setting. It was only when we found an "H" and no "E" that I realized our dyslexic DM had misread the Celtic/FR god Oghma that was used in the Dungeon Magazine adventure he was running.

Expect changes from cannon.

 

[Nightfall]

Voady,

You may expect it, but thanks to WotC's "novel" approach, I'm stuck with it.

 

[rounser]

FR is too big to take in, IMO. To combine it with the Wilderlands approach of filling the wilderness hexes with stuff, AND avoiding "gets-in-the-way" canon such as novels and setting crises I guess you could take something like FR2 Moonshae (where all the writing is set in a time pre-grey box, let alone pre-Time of Troubles and Darkwalker on Moonshae) and:

1) Populate the hexes. Works especially well here, where druids, rangers and bards are so revered - gives them something to do if you turn Moonshae into an outdoor dungeon.
2) Ignore most of the rest of Faerun except to import things from it you like (such as secret organisations like the Zhentarim, maybe a blow-in from Kara Tur or Calimshan, that sort of thing).

That just might be having your cake and eating it, if you're talking about combining the FR and Wilderlands approaches.

 

[rogueattorney]

The only time I can even imagine 'canon' becoming an issue in one of my campaigns would be if there was a second DM running games in the same world. Even then, it would be an "internal" campaign canon rather than an external one - i.e. whatever the DM's agree on.

If any player started hurling canon at me, either he or I wouldn't be in the group for very long.

R.A.

 

[Samnell]

I've never met a player that cared about canon. The parts I don't like, I ignore with ease. No one complains.

I do have a minimal background canon of events ongoing through my various FR games over the years. For example, two different groups have heard about a crusade being organized to liberate Unther from Mulhorand. They've never gone that way, but it's something going on in the background that I made up. That's really more an easter egg for players across multiple campaigns, though.

 

[Shemeska]

To an extent. But since we run a 3e Planescape game, with Toril as the homeworld for one of the PCs, but otherwise not all that important in the grand scheme of things, canon isn't a huge issue.

I'll use established canon as a basis, but then I'll go my own way with it after a certain point. Such is canon's purpose, to put folks all on the same plate in a shared world; a stage if you will that you then adapt and add your own twists upon.

For instance, the first major plot arc in my current campaign had the PCs employed to travel to the Great Dale between the Rawlinswood and the Forest of Lethyr, searching for an object buried in the Great Barrow. I mucked around a bit with the backstory of the Barrow, and deviated from some of 'canon' points, but all in the name of good story.

Some FR 'canon' I'm terribly dismissive of. The 3rd edition cosmology retcon for instance. I consider it mindnumbing pastiche at best, and I dismiss it's relevance, and its validity since it was never addressed in character. It was simply not the case prior to 3.x, and then suddenly it was, and was considered a retroactive change. Lovely invalidation of two editions worth of material on FR and the planes, and the logic holes in FR lore it causes are being ignored as best as possible in the new material like an 800 lb glabrezu in the middle of the room.

It irritates me.

 

[IronWolf]

When I run FR games I tend to focus more on the area the PCs are at and less on the world as a whole. There may be references to greater world events, but probably only heard in passing or via a chain of rumors. I do tend to the use the history of the area up until the point we start the campaign. Then the PCs have some impact on how things proceed and I have no trouble if their actions change or divert from how the canon may have had something happening.

In the groups I have DM'ed I don't think there has been a major concern about canon.

 

[jdrakeh]

I think that any popular setting has a core group of anal-retentive canon fanatics attached to it. I've seen it in FR, but I've really only run into problems with canon during actual play in the old World of Darkness games. Typically, I just avoid playing with anybody who is so anal-retentive about games that ignore bits and pieces of canon that they'll actively try to ruin them (and I've seen more of this than I care to recall).

 

[Nightfall]

Uhm Scarred Lands didn't for me. But then I'm kind of an author so I could do what I liked.

 

[Drowbane]

For almost the entirety of my DM career, I run games in a setting "based on Forgotten Realms". For the most part, things are as written... subject to DM Veto if it doesn't fit *my* view of the world.

I also tend to bring in elements from other settings that I enjoy. Warforged (and artificers) are going to be in my next Realms campaign... and maybe Shifters...

Seriously, I thought everybody ran like this.



Setting Canon is right up there with "RAW"... they both make great guidelines!