Canon and the death of everything we hold dear
That's a little hyperbolic, sure.



I've been vocal about canonical setting material and here I am writing setting material, so I thought I'd better set down how that works. In doing so, I'm forced to actually decide how that works so this is less a manifesto and more an exploration — an attempt to codify perhaps — my feelings on the matter of canon. I may not act in accordance with this sermon but maybe I can pin down my thoughts enough that in future I can hit closer to the mark.

Canon
Canon is the backstory that starts to evolve when a agame has been in existence a while (sometimes a very short while indeed) where that backstory is in some way the official work of the game. That is, it is setting but it is presented as rules and consequently has the force of rules. We in the world of the role-playing game are used to pretty soft rules — certainly almost any discussion of rules defects devolves into an announcement that the rules are yours and you may change them. All manner of gaming atrocities have been committed under the aegis of this so-called "rule zero", at least in part because it's a perfectly valid rule. Like some other rules I'm not prepared to explore deeply here, however, it's one that might be better left out of policy and simply acknowledged as fact: it's better if the rules work so the policy might better be stated that one ought to try to play by the rules because presumably they've been tested and function with the tacit acknowledgement that OF COURSE you own the book and OF COURSE you can do what you want.

Anyway I didn't really want to go there but I had to go there to get here: the rules have some weight no matter what you say in rule zero (or whatever you call it) otherwise the system would be irrelevant to the game. Consequently the setting material also has some weight and that is what comes to be canon and canon wrecks games.

Setting material adds value though! Certainly picking up a game it can be useful to have a setting in which to begin play and ideally a setting in which characters and opponents designed by the game rules make some sense. To some extent a well designed game does this anyway (and classic LBB Traveller is a great example): characters you design with the system are automatically consistent with the setting even if you never announce what that setting is. The result of the character (world, starship, whatever) generation rules, applied strictly, indirectly define the setting.

In fact in the first six books or so of the classic LBB Traveller game, there's only one real stab at canonical setting outside of the results of application of the rules: the Traveller system presupposes a centralised interstellar government that applies high technology in its own interests. Ta-dah. That's it. It's enough.

You want to play the game, though, and you don't feel like generating your own subsector in any interesting detail. You have several choices.

1. Do it anyway. Easy to say. Generating subsectors in interesting detail is non-trivial. Generating them in sparse detail is easy though...
2. Generate sparse detail and wing it. Not everyone is comfortable winging it. I'd argue that they should give it a spin more often and maybe read up on winging it. Still, not everyone's cup of tea. Regardless, software these days makes spinning out a subsector a one-button affair and you can easily extrapolate cultural information from the UWP and, if you trust your players (hint: you should), you can get plenty of help at the table.
3. Use someone elses setting information.

The third option is superficially appealing to almost everyone, and by everyone I deliberately include publishers of your favourite game. It's appealing to the GM because it appears to make his life easier by providing well thought out setting material that he can build on. It appeals to the publisher because it represents ongoing sales in addition to the rules proper, and ongoing sales make publishers happy.

Both are traps, however. For the GM, it doesn't actually make his life easier. Certainly it provides a shortcut to getting a game going, and a valuable one, but it also provides a harness from which it becomes increasingly difficult to escape. Future games become dependent on release schedules instead of the momentum of the game and if ignored, risk either devaluing future canon products or devaluing tha actual game in play. That is, if you want to explore the Amazing Region and it hasn't been published yet, you can either write it or wait for it. If you write it, when it is published the canon material will be different and you will either not buy it (model fails for publisher) or you will and use it later or not at all (reduced value for you) or use it now and retroactively alter you story in progress (reduced value for your players at least). If you wait for it you have to either railroad your players away from it for now or stop the game until it's released. None of these are very satisfying.

Is there a way to compromise? There is obviously going to be a subset of the GM population that at once does not want to write their own material but at the same time does not want to be constrained to canon but also wants to remain consistent. That is, there are GMs that want none of the limitations of canon and all of the benefits.

Yes there is.

Avoiding Canon
First, let's break down why canon constrains. Let's not talk about how much the GM chooses to constrain himself when canon constrains — I don't care about that. It's easy to say that the GM can always ignore canon, but saying that ignores the very real sacrifices that that GM makes: he is basically agreeing not to buy more product or to damage his game or to invest time in reconciliation writing that may prove more extensive than just writing from scratch. Canon as written today is a pain in the ass even if you can "just ignore it". Importantly it's a pain for the publisher that he can avoid if he wants.

Okay, canon constrains by providing a timeline. One of the first things setting writers do is write some history and it implies a timeline. This is because many game writers are frustrated fiction writers. There are a couple of problems with this. First, they are frustrated because they are unsuccessful fiction writers which possibly means they suck at it. Second, this timeline effectively removes huges swatch of setting material from playability.

In support of game writers sucking at fiction I could simply point to their attempts at fiction or their backstory material. However I'll add that they are writing fiction for a segment of the publishing market that makes and pays less than practically every other writing segment anywhere ever. The guy that writes the copy on the wrapper of your frozen burrito made more per word. If the RPG story writer could have made more money elsewhere he would have. Now you, the GM, might suck even worse at it. That's no slander on you — it's probably not your job. But RPGs are not about writing fiction. The fiction comes from interaction at the table. You don't need to write fiction because you have a table full of players to take on most of that burden. So why would you pay for fiction to be written for you anyway, regardless of the quality? And given that it's crap?

That was longer than I wanted so on to the second and more relevant (though likely to get less attention after I just slandered the entire RPG writing world, which necessarily includes myself) point: useful game material is erased. In writing down what happened and when, the author creates places and times in which you cannot interestingly play: canonical events cannot readily be changed. You can't even play around or near the events in case you accidentally change canon or you can go ahead and leave yourself in the position of having to write new material anyway because the canon ceases to function after your changes. Further, any game taking place inside an elaborated history contains characters that are vastly cooler than the player characters — after all, whatever they did made history and there is no mention of the PC activity in that period. Your players are now not even historical footnotes. That sucks!

So my first rule of non-canonical canon is: no timelines. No historical information gets a date. The current date is not stipulated. Past events are broadly described if at all: "at one time there was a vast interstellar empire but now only a smattering of loosely related worlds, all struggling to retain their ancient technologies". Remember, you the GM pay the publisher by the word. Less words and more useful material is value for you. Loads of constraining fluffy crap with huge pictures of it is value for the publisher.

The other thing that canon does is establishes places that the GM cannot create. This happens in two ways: the canon elaborates regions and creates history to establish them, making them hard or impossible to excise without affecting large canonical structures. That's more work for you, the GM, not less unless you always go with canon. And I'll say flat out that if you're the GM that loves canon, plays in canon, and doesn't give a fig for creating his own material, that's going to be totally cool. More power to you. Anyway, the other problem is that even the blank spots on the map are off limits: the publisher might elaborate those (and weave them into the canon fiction) at any time. That will either constrain your play or have you risking new work at a later date or constrain your purchases. Not everyone wins from any of those.

So the second rule of non-canonical canon is: we will tell you where we will never go. The canonical material will have huge regions explicitly fenced off as player zones. Better, the areas we will write will never be the obviously coolest places. We won't write the Imperial core. We won't write the critical choke point between to warring empires. Even better than that, we won't establish exactly where anything we write is. It can fit anywhere you like — after all it has no timeline and a vague backstory only. Your work as GM is minimised and we the publishers are constrained to writing high quality material that fits our interface rather than just elaborating bad fan fiction with game stats.

Interface
So there is a kind of interface — and interfaces are a kind of contract — between the publisher of non-canonical canon and the GM. This contract is designed to make sure the most GMs get the most bang for their buck and so that the publisher has an endless stream of product open to them even though it might be a little more work to produce. Here's that contract:

We the publishers are not writing fiction for your entertainment. We won't even try. Sure there might be a little short blurb to describe some interaction in an interesting area or a vague discussion of what happened to make a place what it is now, but we're not going to write stories.

We the publishers will not establish timelines of events. We'll contrain our dates to "in the recent past" and "in the distant past" and our historical figures to "a powerful king" and a "conquering hero". One way we will avoid timelines is by simply not describing setting altering events unless they are far before played game time. Which emperor killed his dad to rule is not our business; it's yours.

We the publishers will not draw a map of the entire universe but rather will describe the geo- (astro- ?) graphic position of our material in the vaguest possible terms. "A subsector on the frontiers" will suffice. "A core world" is sufficient.

We the publishers will give you details that are useful but modular. A list of patrons, a map of relationships between major NPCs even, but not a detailed prior history and certainly not a future history. We will give you ideas, kernels, seeds, but we will not take over your whole job as GM. We'll provide ship designs, floorplans, new weapons, cool gadgets, interesting people, difficult relationships, interesting worlds, and novel ideas but we will not string them all together for you. Stringing them together is for you and, more importantly, your whole table to do.

The story, ultimately, has to be yours. When the publisher takes ownership of the story, he steals your game.

Current revision with outgoing links is here.