Headcanons about your favorite settings

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CT_Phipps

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Just your favorite thoughts you've had about everything from Eberron to Star Trek to Star Wars to Night City. Things that are true in your games that are either just alluded to or not at all in canon.

I'll start us off:

Star Trek: There's no discontinuity in Star Trek. Whenever something looks different or is a retcon, it's just because of the constant time travel. Yes, this means Klingon appearances, bridges, uniforms, Eugenics War dates, the fact that Klingon First Contact wasn't disastrously wrong, and so on. Hell, Archer's entire series, are all the result of time being constantly meddled with. Nothing is wrong. Everything is just updated.
 
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Mecha don't actually exist in Exalted. There are big armours that make you potentially faster and stronger, but they're individual and as rare as hen's teeth, meaning, you can't actually get one with Merit points. Artefact rating N/A.
Firewands are also used only sparingly. Firedust is primarily used for incendiary bombs.
Due to how expensive firedust actually is, the Goddess Of Riches Shared With The Community has promised to beat the Malfeas out of anyone practicing Righteous Devil style instead of using the money to benefit people. And it is rumoured that Chejop Kajak would hesitate to accept an invitation to a martial arts duel from her.
Accidentally, she is also a major reason why the aforementioned bombs haven't been used for carpet bombing. Instead, sky ships tend to throw boulders.
 
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So, like... you are OK with the prequels, midichlorians and all?

My particular headcanon is that biologically, Force users have a substance that builds up in blood with the greater use of it that can be tested scientifically despite being spiritual in nature.

And this has kark all to do with Qui Gon telling Anakin a silly story to answer his question that would probably require at least a high school diploma in biology to even dumb down.
 
Star Trek: The Federation's dogged devotion to science and discovery means that it actually has the most singularly powerful weapons and ships in the Alpha Quadrant. The Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans instead spend the majority of their GDP on "military spending" and get significantly less bang for their buck. This is because trying to build bigger shields and bigger bombs is less effective than discovering a weird radiation type that utterly changes the nature of how energy weapons works.

The other powers refuse to believe the Federation isn't doing this deliberately and assume all the exploration is out of a desire to find new tech and build military alliances.

Amusingly, the other powers constant imperialism and threatening other races means the Federation never lacks for people trying to join them as protection against hostile foreign powers ala NATO. The Klingons came to the conclusion the Federation was helping them after TUC because they wanted strong enemies to force other races to want to join their alliance, which actually made the Khitomer Treaty palatable to the Klingon hardliners.
 
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Star Wars: Every film before Rogue One is a an ecclectic mix of rock-solid fact and unreliable author. Every film after The Mandalorian is documenting only one potential future, or just plain cheap fan fic; either way it is wiped from my canon.
Dr Who: The series bookended and finished with Capaldi's doctor about to regen.
Glorantha: There are no Duck people. The Duruluz are fierce halflings who live in reed huts and boats in swamps and along riverbanks. Duckpoint is their biggest settlement, named after their founder Aldrik Duck.
RuneQuest - Adventures in Glorantha: This edition was successfully completed instead of the current RQG. Collaborative effort between the current RQG team and TDM, essientially keeping RQ6/Mythras as core BRP build, and uses the artwork and narratives from the current edition of RQG
James Bond 007: Daniel Craig's version is over. Henry Cavill is the next Bond.
 
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James Bond 007: Daniel Craig's version is over. Henry Cavill is the next Bond.

Craig's Bond is the son of Sean Connery's Bond.*

He also found the idea of his deranged foster brother calling himself Blofeld to the most pathetic thing he'd ever heard.

* Connery Bond didn't die in a climbing accident, that was just the cover story while he was imprisoned in The Rock.
 
Glorantha: There are no Duck people. The Duruluz are fierce halflings who live in reed huts and boats in swamps and along riverbanks. Duckpoint is their biggest settlement, named after their founder Aldrik Duck.

As a former player of a death duck, who came to an untimely demise after losing a battle with a spirit that had something like 7D6 POW, I feel personally attacked.
No. He wasn't called Howard.
 
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As a former player of a death duck, who came to an untimely demise after loosing a battle with a spirit that had something like 7D6 POW, I feel personally attacked.
No. He wasn't called Howard.
You may have hailed from the isolated Cursed Village, wherein many of the Duruluz villagers are born as lycanthropes, the Were-Ducks, due to an ancient regional myth involving the war god Humakt and a flock of fowl :grin:
 
You may have hailed from the isolated Cursed Village wherein many of the Duruluz villagers are born as lycanthropes, the Were-Ducks, due to an ancient regional myth involving the war god Humakt and a flock of fowl.
Does a warehouse turn into a house on the full moon?
This, and more ancient mysteries tonight at 9:30.
 
Exalted

Autochthonia created Creation 2.0 (The Wod) and transplanted a bunch of Exalted types to the New World, except greatly reduced in power in hopes it would lead to a better setting.

Creation 2.0 was ALSO destroyed and replaced with Creation 3.0 (Requiem).

However, Creation 3.0 was something that not every one of his followers were happy with and they actually took the source code for Creation 2.0 and rebooted it from where it left off with a patch.
 
I don’t tend to have a lot of this, but I’ll toss in a few
  • My own worlds with halflings tend to have them as dark sun barbaric halflings. I assume at some point I’ll come up with a deep reason for this like they are all dimension hopping or something
  • Thennla - centaurs are all male and breed with female horses. It’s pretty messed up, but also feels like myth. It loosely applies to other half animal sorts as well, like satyrs, etc.
  • In norse myth, where I have run a couple of campaigns, there is a river of the dead. It’s a real river, and has been blocked by a mammoth pile of corpses causing it to flood the nine

not sure if this is what you are going for but there we have it.
 
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  • Thennla - centaurs are all male and breed with female horses. It’s pretty messed up, but also feels like myth. It loosely applies to other half animal sorts as well, like satyrs, etc.

Pan or fauns shagging a goat was a pretty common theme in classical sculpture and knockoffs thereof, although centaurs shagging horses didn't seem to be as popular -

Pan1.jpg
01183689_004.jpg
This may fall into the category of 'too much information.'
 
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Terminator - Sarah Conner lives past Judgement day and sees Skynet defeated. She then descends into the nuclear bunker where the giant 1980s era supercomputer lives. Skynet tries to talk to her. Tries to reason with her. She doesn't say a word. Just lights up a cigarette, blows the smoke into Skynets "face" and then slowly starts to pull out it's memory banks one at a time...

(Yeah its a ripoff of Bowman killing HAL-9000, whatever...)
 
Terminator - Sarah Conner lives past Judgement day and sees Skynet defeated. She then descends into the nuclear bunker where the giant 1980s era supercomputer lives. Skynet tries to talk to her. Tries to reason with her. She doesn't say a word. Just lights up a cigarette, blows the smoke into Skynets "face" and then slowly starts to pull out it's memory banks one at a time...

(Yeah its a ripoff of Bowman killing HAL-9000, whatever...)

This was actually cannon to the Sarah Connor Chronicles but time-travel is actually parallel universe jumping and thus Skynet's efforts are completely pointless except for ruining the days of many a John and Sarah Connor.
 
Star Wars: In my games there are no named characters from the movies. Characters did not go to high school with the Grand Moff Tarkin's niece, they don't know any famous bounty hunters, they are not Wedge Antilles' cousin, etc.

Sometimes it feels like the Star Wars universe only has like 1000 people in it. :hehe:
 
This was actually cannon to the Sarah Connor Chronicles but time-travel is actually parallel universe jumping and thus Skynet's efforts are completely pointless except for ruining the days of many a John and Sarah Connor.

I have no memory of that show! I should rewatch it. The last movie kind of went all weird with the timeline as well.
 
Star Trek: There's no discontinuity in Star Trek. Whenever something looks different or is a retcon, it's just because of the constant time travel. Yes, this means Klingon appearances, bridges, uniforms, Eugenics War dates, the fact that Klingon First Contact wasn't disastrously wrong, and so on. Hell, Archer's entire series, are all the result of time being constantly meddled with. Nothing is wrong. Everything is just updated.
So you'e saying the temporal cold war was a good idea after all? Haha.

Hmmm...

The most important one for me is Doctor Who, so let's look at that.

The classic series mostly runs as is, with a couple of shitty stories dropped, and a little tidy up of elements that snuck past script editors in the day. Mostly, the Time Lords never become the useless boobs they are seen as from the 3rd Doctor's era onwards. They remain the aloof, all-powerful techno-gods seen at the end of the War Games. The Doctor is terrified of them, and rightly so, and I love that.

Robert Holmes is Doctor Who's all-time best writer, but his dislike of the powerful Time Lords and reduction of them led to them being panto villains or stooges of the worst sort.

Conseqentially... The Deadly Assassin never happens (and I don't rate that story... Time Lord reporters for god's sake), the Time War never happens, or happens amongst other species and the Daleks, with the TIme Lords remain indifferent arseholes to it all. The Master's later destruction of Gallifrey never happens, because the Time Lords would erase him from f'n existence for even thinking about it! The Timeless Child gibberish and Division are, of course, bollocks to be ejected into the vortex.

And... Y'know, the rest of the show actually runs pretty much as it did. Genesis of the Daleks can still fit no problem, since I see no reason the Time Lords wouldn't let their wayward little Doctor get his hands dirty for them. Hell, even Trial of a Time Lord could sorta work... It'd need a bit of rewriting though.

Yeah, I can fix most of what I dislike abot old/new Who simply by not making the Time Lords a punching bag.

This is the biggest change I've made to the Doctor Who setting for my own games set in it.
 
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Eberron: It all looks and feels like the James Bond movies. I minimize the medieval aspects and play up the super-spy vibes.

Ravenloft: Dominic d'Honnaire is Harvey Weinstein. Witches (warlocks) are charming morons (high CHA and dumped INT) who almost always deserve their damnation and I play them mostly as edgelady/edgelord jokes.

Legend of the Five Rings: The naga? Just a footnote, not really worth mentioning, nobody talks about them, did they even exist?

7th Sea: The aristocratic sorceries are forever unexplainable. Rumors of demonic or alien origins for them are just that, rumors.
 
Eberron: It all looks and feels like the James Bond movies. I minimize the medieval aspects and play up the super-spy vibes.

Ravenloft: Dominic d'Honnaire is Harvey Weinstein. Witches (warlocks) are charming morons (high CHA and dumped INT) who almost always deserve their damnation and I play them mostly as edgelady/edgelord jokes.

Legend of the Five Rings: The naga? Just a footnote, not really worth mentioning, nobody talks about them, did they even exist?

7th Sea: The aristocratic sorceries are forever unexplainable. Rumors of demonic or alien origins for them are just that, rumors.
With 7th Sea I always translate the nations made up names into their historic names. :smile:
 
Star Wars: Every film before Rogue One is a an ecclectic mix of rock solid fact and unreliable author. Every film after The Mandalorian is only one potential future, or just plain cheap fan fic, and thus is wiped from my canon.

^This. Except every film after The Mandalorian is 100% made up cheap fan fic and not even a potential future. Also bits and pieces of the EU are true regardless of what the IP's owners might say, and the Force is 100% spiritual with no silly microbes behind it.

Dark Sun: Everything that happened after the first two novels is fake, and only the original boxset and the early supplements (like Dune Trader, Veiled Alliance, Elves of Athas, etc.) are true. The new areas revealed in the Expanded & Revised boxset do not exist.

D&D in General: Dark Elves may have brown skin, as depicted in some of the early art, and elves are actually fey, outside of Dark Sun, where they're a weird offshoot adapted to the setting.
 
Vampire the Masquerade - For me, the later metaplot and never-ending splat books ruined the setting. That and the creator's constant insertion of their own mediocre characters. That said once you stripped it back it was fine.

The same thing with Rifts, the core and a few of the supplements were cool, but it went on and on and on and on... And the material only got more bizarre (and unusable in my opinion).

Less is more! :smile:
 
As a former player of a death duck, who came to an untimely demise after losing a battle with a spirit that had something like 7D6 POW, I feel personally attacked.
No. He wasn't called Howard.

Incidentally, the Secret of Mana games frequently used duck warriors as enemies. I've always wondered if this was the result of a Japanese game dev encountering Glorantha during his explorations of western tabletop material and thinking duck warriors were nifty.

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Southern Cross isn't a part of Robotech.

Something else happens in that timeslot in my versions of Robotech. Generally, I declare that a Marduuk fleet discovers Earth's solar system. In my timelines, the Marduuk were the Warrior caste of the Robotech Masters, and were the elite forces responsible for directly overseeing the Zentraedi.

So something similar to Macross II happens instead of the 24 episodes of Southern Cross. And during those events on Earth, the SDF Pioneer and the Expeditionary Fleet are actually still in hyperspace en route to Fantoma and Tirol. The REF hasn't even made their first encounter with the forces of the Regent yet, and won't even know their fold took a full decade of time in realspace until years into the Sentinel campaign.

Dana Sterling was a cyan haired pilot of an Alpha fighter rather than a blonde pilot of a Veritech Hover Tank. Basically, none of the canonical mecha of the Southern Cross existed. The Earth Defense Forces of that period used the same equipment which had been developed for the Expeditionary Force as well as any aging Macross era machines still in service.
 
Vampire the Masquerade - For me, the later metaplot and never-ending splat books ruined the setting. That and the creator's constant insertion of their own mediocre characters. That said once you stripped it back it was fine.

The same thing with Rifts, the core and a few of the supplements were cool, but it went on and on and on and on... And the material only got more bizarre (and unusable in my opinion).

Less is more! :smile:

I never got around to playing any old White Wolf games other than Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but I had most of the old core books (Vampire, Werewolf, Wrath, Changeling, Wraith, Mummy, Mage), and once they started with the setting revisions around the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem book I lost all interest in them.

I also loved the Rifts books, but they coughed out so many of them, and were so inconsistent about the power levels between books I eventually lost interest or even track of WTF was going on with it.
 
I never got around to playing any old White Wolf games other than Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but I had most of the old core books (Vampire, Werewolf, Wrath, Changeling, Wraith, Mummy, Mage), and once they started with the setting revisions around the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem book I lost all interest in them.

You missed out their best work - Street Fighter!.
 
I never got around to playing any old White Wolf games other than Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but I had most of the old core books (Vampire, Werewolf, Wrath, Changeling, Wraith, Mummy, Mage), and once they started with the setting revisions around the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem book I lost all interest in them.

I also loved the Rifts books, but they coughed out so many of them, and were so inconsistent about the power levels between books I eventually lost interest or even track of WTF was going on with it.

Yeah... Both of those were impossible to keep track of. :smile: To be honest I had most of the Vamp books and a few of the Werewolf books. But then they just kept flinging out the other games which didn't really interest me. I wanted the WoD to be mainly dealing with Vamps. Plus, the supplements just got worse as time went on. :sad:

The power balance in Rifts was egregious. One PC a seven-foot armored cyborg killing machine with 'extra' MDC armor on top of that. Which made him virtually unkillable. Then you've got a Juicer with a pea shooter and 10 mdc damage armor or some such. I dropped it too as time went on.
 
You missed out their best work - Street Fighter!.

I never ran into it. Though, I was never a fan of fighting games, but I probably would've considered getting the RPG just for kickers, cuz I liked the characters. I also missed Aberrant, and a couple of others I can't remember.
 
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