Canon among those who call themselves fans, or nerds, or whatever label one personally slaps on themselves or others is an oft hotly debated topic. This is particularly true of movie franchises, TV shows, comic books, and novels of fantasy. Less often does it crop up in speculative fiction, but there too it rears its misbegotten head.
I have something of a love/hate relationship with it. As a fan, I'm certainly willing to delve into the details of a particular universe and nitpick about consistency from one story to the next, and I love thinking and creating detailed and consistent settings for my own creative works. However, I'm also of the strong opinion that canon, as it's most commonly viewed among fans, is the death of creativity.
This is not an opinion most fans hold, and I'm sure some who read this will be sharpening their figurative knives and ready to use their superior reasoning skills to cut my opinions to ribbons. Let them. I'm not going to discuss at length the canon of any particular series or franchise, because it ultimately isn't the point. A medium of entertainment that is passively enjoyed (like reading a book, or viewing a show) can have whatever level of canon it likes, adhering to one or not as the particular stories demand.
Obviously, my intention is to discuss canon within roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require active participation in the game world, a combination of suspension of disbelief and agency in a world vaguely defined by players describing actions, GM descriptions, and some rules using dice or some other mechanic to replicate "chancy" situations with uncertain outcomes.
It is thus that canon actively interferes with the gameworld as seen through the eyes of the players. Take for instance the Forgotten Realms setting. It has many thoroughly and luridly detailed non-player characters who are many magnitudes of power greater than most player characters will ever be, and they are locked in titanic struggles with each other, the gods, and even entire nations. This tacit acknowledgement of these characters as fixtures of setting lore renders the player characters as bit participants in a larger conflict (and this is fine, occasionally).
My problem with it from a GM, as well as a creative, standpoint is that it boxes in what can and cannot be in the setting. If a GM details a town and sets it down on the Sword Coast, say between Candlekeep and Baldur's Gate, you will inevitably have someone who has read the novels or played the computer games complaining that no such town exists, and that it breaks their verisimilitude of the world as they have come to know it. Worse, it's not just GMs who have to suffer under the yoke of canon. If a player wishes to detail a heretofore unknown ethnic group in the setting, but wants them close enough to be relevant to the part of the game world they'll be playing in, room must be made for them. Even then, you'll get someone who "knows" the setting better than everyone else who will exclaim that such and such part of the world can't possibly support a nomadic tribe because of some obscure setting detail laid out in the XIXth novel of the Swords of Drakehall series, and by the Guide to Drakehall and Surrounding Environs from 1985.
I am not for a minute suggesting that one should throw out a setting's details. What I am saying is that the details are less important as published than they are as imagined by the players (naturally, the GM is a player as well). This is especially true of events in setting. In the Dragonlance setting, there's several wars that have huge impact on the setting, as well as a handful of cosmic events that affect religion in the setting. There's a concrete timeline, and frankly, I loathe the idea that these events are set in stone, as though the player characters are incapable of changing them and that time itself is on some kind of track that cannot be diverted through heroism or villainy. It runs counter to the very core of roleplaying games, and violates the player's agency - undermining their choices and actions.
To examine this further, there is a part of the Dragonlance saga where the evil goddess Takhisis steals the world away from the other gods, and this so weakens her that she is unable to enact her plans for world domination for a good long time. In the meanwhile, alien dragons arrive on Krynn, and take over the place, changing the landscape to suit them. Magic runs amok because High Magic, as defined and controlled through adherence to the gods of magic and the moons that represent them, is withering on the vine without the presence of said gods. Divine magic too suffers from this lack of gods, and even Takhisis is too weak to help her followers, causing a crisis of faith merely a half century after divine magic had returned to the world during the War of the Lance.
For my part, this not only robs the Heroes of the Lance of their victory, but it also takes away one of the defining moments of the setting: the return of divine magic. More than that, any characters who were Clerics or Wizards suddenly find themselves bereft of their reliable powers, and can either convert to the new magic system for the age (mysticism and sorcery, respectively) or find themselves permanently depowered. It's a cataclysmic event for the sake of having one. Anyone who decides to play a version of Dragonlance where Krynn isn't stolen by the Dark Queen is playing a homebrewed version by default; nevermind that it's both more interesting and less of a rules nightmare.
My oldest roleplying group, the group I began this journey with, and among whom I count many as friends, has a version of the Forgotten Realms that is quite different from the one that exists currently. Since we haven't played in some time, the year is currently 1386 DR, the Spell Plague has not occurred (and won't), and there's a fortress on the Sword Coast a bit North of the Cloud Peaks that's blossomed into a small city, a location founded by one of the players, back when castles were a class feature. I have often used this city as a location to springboard campaigns. Why start in Baldur's Gate when we can start in Seaview? Why play a Wizard from the Dale Lands when we can play one who started from Seaview's battlemage school as taught by the founder of the city himself?
With this, we've created a shared, living history. One that cannot co-exist with the current canon. I find this superior to arguing over whether or not the Spell Plague should have destroyed Seaview, or whether or not the Second Sundering should have restored it as it restored many other dead characters or ruined nations. It's a headache I'd rather avoid.
In my own homebrew settings, I try to encourage my players to add details I haven't thought of. They can make their characters exotic foreigners from far away lands who fight crusades against foes I have only mentioned in passing. The player's contributions to those worlds gives them part authorship, and I'm absolutely fine with this, since when we play RPGs, they are not playing my premade story, they're not looking for my cookie crumb narrative - they tell the story by their actions and their choices. I make notes of NPCs who might be helpful or in authority over a given place, but if my players never interact with them it is little lost. I'd much rather detail the hobbling beggar they have been kind to, an NPC they became invested in just because they liked my flavorful description.
It isn't really my world. I create some structure to it, the bones, if you well, the flesh. My players give it life, breath, heartbeat, and blood. But once I let my players free in it, it becomes our world. A shared thing, where stories happen. Nothing gives me greater joy than that - and the only canon that matters is the one we agree on, together. Published settings and word of god can only give us the beginning state of such a world. The end state is entirely determined by us, and really, in a large part by the player characters. That isn't to say that I don't have NPCs moving in the background, doing their own plotting and putting into action said plots - it would be a dull world if it revolved entirely around the players.
But, the most important thing is to never force the players get involved with any particular thing. That's the often maligned railroading. Which is probably another discussion for another time.
To conclude, canon in roleplaying games should ideally be something shared between the participants, rather than handed down from on high by game developers and world builders. If such a canon of the imagination can be said to exist at all.
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