Playing with Canon

Every D&D campaign develops its own canon through play. Some canon is serious and epic, such as the years of storytelling in high profile Actual Plays like Critical Role. Other campaigns are silly and loose, freely retconning things for the purpose of in-the-moment comedy. Both are correct; canon is a tool, not a goal. When used well, canon adds depth and verisimilitude. When used poorly, it’s a straightjacket that constricts storytelling.

TTRPGs are an unusual storytelling medium because canon is a mix of officially published material and what’s established at an individual table; other mediums have dealt with the problems of many authors (comics most notably), but the typical Game Master is not an employee of a publishing company that can approve or reject writing choices (how canon is handled in high-profile Actual Plays that have literal writers rooms is beyond the scope of this article).

The purpose of this piece is to explore what it means for an individual table to be the final arbiter of canon while taking input from other sources, in three increasingly-defined structures: The fully homebrew game, published campaign settings, and finally published adventure modules. Each layer builds on the tools and techniques of the last, while incorporating the additional external inputs.

The Homebrew Game

From past surveys, most games of Dungeons & Dragons take place in a fully “homebrew” game — that is to say, the world and the plot of the game are entirely constructed by the Dungeon Master. Systems such as GURPS or Savage Worlds go further, enabling significant customization of the rules of the game itself. This does put most of the work on the person running the game, but this work can be very rewarding.

Implicit Setting Definitions

It’s worth noting that most game systems come with some form of implicit setting; Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy game that has elves, dwarves, beholders, and mind flayers. Monster of the Week takes place in something resembling the real world but with supernatural events. Changing this often takes significant work; there’s numerous “D&D 5e but Sci-Fi” conversions, but these conversions take hundreds of pages to redo the core conventions of the game to suit the new setting and genre. Some games, such as Blades in the Dark, have much more than an “implicit” setting and as such are covered below under Published Campaign Settings.

Developing Canon

Canon in these homebrew games tends to lean much more heavily on what’s established in play; there’s no broader audience to serve with extensive external writing. This means record-keeping is especially important; there’s many different campaign journal methods,

• A physical notes journal

• A folder of Word documents or Google Docs

• General note-taking applications like OneNote or Notion

• Dedicated TTRPG campaign management software like World Anvil and Kanka

• (For people on VTTs) built-in journal functionality

Each has different costs, benefits, and levels of commitment; A simple journal works well if it’s a light game where you only need minimal details, while a game of complicated politics and deeply held grudges benefits from more expansive and organized systems.

Conservation of Detail. With a single audience — your players — you only need the information that’s relevant to what they’re experiencing. In feudal fantasy, the local lord is more important than the king, despite the latter being more powerful; your players have a chance at actually interacting with the local lord in a way they don’t with the king. You don’t need to know how time travel works or if it’s even possible if it’s not going to come up in your game. The grand workings of the cosmos matter less than the individual demon or angel that shows up in your game. If you want to write more than what’s necessary you can, but it’s important to balance burnout risk with the actual benefits to the game that is played. Sometimes this is helpful — authors like Brandon Sanderson are notorious for keeping extensive external records — but these usually amount to personal creative writing exercises rather than legitimate game prep. This is a hobby, you can spend your time how you want, but if your goal is improving your game then spending time on creative writing exercises is a poor use of it.

Borrowing Ideas. One important technique in homebrew games is borrowing ideas from other works and incorporating them into your own. Many TTRPG books are written with this explicit purpose; general lore supplements like Fizban’s Tome of Dragons provide numerous ideas bereft from the context of a broader world, like hors d'oeuvres on a party platter. Even material that’s for a specific setting is fair game; if you like the Warforged of Eberron and the color-coded wizards of Dragonlance, just add them to your game!

However, looking to other works within the medium limits your source of inspiration — anything can serve as creative inspiration. The angelic aesthetics of the video game Diablo, the descriptions of magic of Uprooted (by Naomi Novik), and the nuanced politics of the TV series Arcane are all things you can pull into your own game. Finding things you love and are excited about and bringing them into your own game is a great way to prevent burnout; remember that there’s no such thing as plagiarism when you’re adapting material for home game use.

Published Campaign Settings

The TTRPG industry is full of published campaign settings. The Forgotten Realms and Eberron for D&D; Halcyon City for Masks, Duskvol for Blades in the Dark. Each is full of plot hooks, antagonists, and compelling lore. The reason to use a published campaign setting is it gives you a basis from which to build your game, as well as a common language — your players may come in with some idea already of how the setting works, reducing the cognitive load of starting a new game. The community around a setting can provide further depth beyond what the publisher wrote, enriching your experience even further. However, there are a few things to watch out for.

Preventing Overload

One common issue with published settings is there’s simply more material available than one can reasonably read, absorb, and remember. What’s worse, sometimes one of the players may know more than you about the world! This culminates in a feeling that running the world is an exercise in failing an exam, because there are correct answers that you just don’t know.

The solution here is to set boundaries; it’s your Eberron. It’s your Golarion. It’s your Shadowrun. Some settings certainly make this easier than others; anything with an active metaplot forces you to choose between maintaining full creative freedom of your game and respecting the world-shaking events authored by the publisher. Outside of that external restriction, however, maintaining your independence is the best way to prevent the problem of too much canon. Maybe the canon books represent only public or even outdated knowledge; maybe the canon just flat out isn’t relevant and what’s in your game is totally distinct. This, incidentally, is the same way you can run a “historical” game or anything involving time travel — if the characters change a canon event, that’s how it’s happened in this game.

Writing that hasn’t aged well

A second and unfortunately common issue can be politely phrased as “Writing that hasn’t aged well”; alternatively, “The writers were ignorant at best and bigoted at worst”. Topics like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the obvious examples, but there’s plenty of other ways writing can look bad in retrospect, such as the handling of disabilities.

One way to approach these topics is to rewrite the lore; make the world more diverse and tolerant than it’s canonically presented. There’s always an abundance of canonical figures with no more than a sentence to describe them whose ancestry and gender are easily fungible. More prominent figures can be difficult, especially when they have canonical art; in these cases, it may be useful to have those figures be the former person in that role, with their replacement embodying a more diverse vision of the setting. This is a useful technique when dealing with settings that are simply neglectful of certain kinds of representation, such as D&D’s total aversion to queer characters prior to 5e, or when a setting invokes a culture in a shallow and stereotypical way, such as almost any writing about indigenous-coded groups.

A second option is to deconstruct the existing lore; Orcs aren’t marauding rapists with an evil god, but that’s how the human kingdoms justify wars of conquest against an already-marginalized group. This goes hand-in-hand with the change of perspective that the powerful figures who express rank prejudice are bad people rather than good people. For settings where bigotry is deeply entrenched in the world this can be a more effective strategy than rewriting to be more diverse and inclusive, both in terms of preserving what’s drew you to the world in the first place as well as being economical with prep time.

There’s no right answer here; what works best for you may not work well for another person, but in terms of willingness to engage with bigoted works as well as simply practical concerns like how much work it can be to rewrite something. What’s important is that your group is happy with the end result and has a better time playing because of it.

Developing Canon

Even when playing in a published setting, your group will develop its own canon. Setting books tend to prioritize high level information — what’s the economy like, what’s the local religion, what big war happened recently — while games take place on a much more micro level. Furthermore, some regions get more attention than others; some areas are well-fleshed out, while others provide only minimalist descriptions. All of this means is that even if you hold everything in canon as literally true, your group will be building on top of that.

Interpreting Canon. Sometimes canon is vague and non-specific about how something works. One critical consideration when interpreting that is what it means for the tone of your game; if a group of apparent do-gooders is earnest and true in their conviction that has very different effects than if they’re secretly corrupt. Nobles can be inherently corrupt and tyrannical or virtuous stewards of their people. There’s no right answers here, but your answers should be intentional.

Divergence. One way to think about canon is to think of it like a house.

• Load-bearing walls that make the setting what it is, and if you remove it you aren’t really “playing in that setting” any more and are more just playing in a homebrew world inspired by that setting.

• In the middle are curtain walls; they provide structure and form, but if you remove them nothing is going to collapse. Understanding what elements of a setting fall.

• Other things are wallpaper; you can change it out without structural consequence, even if there might be better or worse choices from an aesthetic perspective.

What elements are which depends on the setting, and individual opinions will differ on the core importance of different elements. In the Eberron campaign setting, the mystery of the Mourning is a curtain wall — it’s the primary reason the nations aren’t at war, so if you resolve that mystery then you’ve made substantial changes to the shape and structure of the international political scene but it’s still recognizably the Eberron campaign setting.

By contrast, removing the Dragonmarked Houses entirely would dramatically change the setting — they’re a load-bearing wall. You certainly could play without them, but it weakens many of the advantages of using a published setting; community content is less likely to to be helpful, you have to do a ton of extra work to account for a commonly referenced feature of the setting being missing, and in general you’re back to making a homebrew game. Maybe that’s your goal; Doomed Forgotten Realms takes a sledgehammer to plenty of load-bearing walls and makes the setting practically unrecognizable, but there’s a lot of elements that are nevertheless familiar.

And of course, there’s lots of things that are wallpaper you can change without concern. The identity of a minor gang lord, the culture of a faraway land; all of these written elements usually have a purpose but getting rid of them won’t impact everything else. This can be a great way to incorporate material written outside of the context of the setting — Wizards of the Coast in 3rd edition prominently featured ways to incorporate otherwise setting-neutral content into its flagship settings, the Forgotten Realms and Eberron.

Published Modules

The third and most developed form of canon is a published module, whether a single 4-hour adventure or a full campaign written to last hundreds of hours. Some are a strictly defined, linear experience; others present a large region to wander around and explore in whatever order. In theory, these reduce prep requirements to nearly nothing — just run a game straight from the book.

There’s a lot of advice on the internet both broadly and specifically about pulling a published module apart for parts, as well as how to prep and run them. Instead, I’ll look at how published modules use canon in the form of metaplot.

Metaplot

Metaplot in a TTRPG context is the idea that your game is part of a larger narrative; events written by the publisher affect ALL games, with publishers often having some way community feedback can affect the shape of the story. This strategy peaked in the early-mid 1990s, but mostly fell out of favor by the end of the decade with the collapse of TSR and the release of the early MMOs (Ultima Online in ‘97, Everquest in ‘99, Runescape in ‘01). Still, it hasn’t totally gone away, with the World of Darkness remaining the most committed to maintaining a metaplot and Paizo to a lesser extent.

The strength of a metaplot, when coupled with playable modules, is it provides a continuous and shared gaming experience — everyone is experiencing the same new things together, allowing the social benefits of shared discussion like a weekly serial TV series. The weakness is it puts a lot of strain on the publisher to deliver a consistently high quality experience; furthermore, it can make new player acquisition difficult by raising the barrier to “jumping in” or requiring a group to somehow “catch up”. It also makes adhering to canon far more important — the whole point of the tightly shared experience is you are playing in the same world as everyone else.

Ultimately, MMOs like World of Warcraft and especially Final Fantasy XIV execute on this shared experience better. TTRPGs inherently bring a certain level of creative freedom that works crosswise with the linear demands of a metaplot. Furthermore, the advancement mechanics of MMOs do a much better job of filling in the time between story releases — the constant need to acquire more releases for ever-more marginal gains has proved itself to be an effective player retention mechanic.

Conclusion

Canon is a tool to help writers maintain consistency and verisimilitude. That is to say, an adherence to canon helps people who engage with your story feel like there’s a deeper world beyond the literal content of the story, engaging them on a more fundamental level by inviting them to think about the internal logic of your world. At the same time, canon is no replacement for the other tools of writing. Game masters must learn the core techniques of writing like character development, pre-written lore and canon can never replace them. Often online I will see people reaching for canon as a “What do people from X group think”, when that’s not how people work at all — individuals are diverse and complicated, and leaning on “the lore” this way simply leads to stereotyping. A deep and believable world is fun, but ultimately we connect to deep and believable people, and that requires skills beyond a mastery of canon.