How faithful do you stick to the lore of premade settings?

[ffilz]

I think it's remarkably hard to translate fiction into games, because most fiction is able to make places seem mysterious and unknowable. I felt that way about Thieves' World - once you put Sanctuary on a map, especially with a place like the Maze, it just becomes small and disappointing.

Pavis was much more interesting to me from the Griselda stories than the actual city boxed set when I eventually got it. I think that was the death knell of my interest in Glorantha, actually - anything beyond the hints in the core book. I remember an early online map which made the Big Rubble 10 times the size compared to New Pavis, and that felt much better than the official thing.

The lesson, to my mind, is to keep things as vague as possible, adding detail only as and when needed. Preserve that sense of wonder and mystery.

I am very drawn to city maps yet I have yet to run a really successful urban campaign. One question I have about the size of cities is how well the city map fits the presumed population of the city and how "realistic" the size of the city is.

 

[Ravenswing]

Huh. While most of my gamewriting work was for licensed settings -- principally ICE for Middle-Earth, ironically enough -- the only fixed setting I ever ran was Scarlet Pimpernel.

{EDIT: Gah, I had a senior moment. I've also run Firefly, as well as a Champions campaign set in metro Boston, where we were all living and where the game was being held. I'd submit that such was as much of a fixed setting for the purpose of this thread as any other.}

With that, I stayed pretty much faithful to Baroness Orczy's oeuvre. But with that, while we're talking one of the more momentous times in Western history -- the unfolding of the French Revolution and the prelude to the Napoleonic era -- the premise comes down to "Here we are doing thrilling swashbuckling one-off adventures." Sure, I could have decided for campaign purposes that Queen Charlotte was the ruler of England (she'd have been a sight better than her father, anyway), that Danton and the Cordeliers had prevailed over Robespierre, and that a 25-year-old General Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot" had taken place two years earlier than it really had.

But ultimately, it'd have begged the question as to why? None of my players were students of the period's history. The only quasi-historical figure with whom they interacted was heavily altered by Orczy. The degree to which they gave a damn about the political ebb and flow was based around a key recurring NPC politician belonging to a more liberal faction that was being squeezed out by the ultras. And ultimately, as members of a secret society engaged in rescues of those the government persecuted, any metagaming they did (alright, this St-Just IS a purist bastard, and Robespierre's right hand man) would've given them background and information their characters would reasonably have known.

Not that this is a new issue ...

 

[Ravenswing]

(Originally posted in 2003)

But screwing with the core of the setting without any good reason, like getting rid of kender from Dragonlance, as you mentioned, or saying it's going to be WoD when you get post-apoc, is just betraying the players.

Perhaps, but let's get a grip. Is anyone seriously suggesting that kender are central and essential to the Dragonlance world and mythos, without which the whole setting comes tumbling down?

That being said, do world changing GM's actually ask their players if they want the world changed?

I sure don't. I am not a public utility. It is my decision, and mine alone, what I am going to run and how I'm going to run it. While I agree that prior disclosure is essential and that bait & switch blows, "Because it suits me" is a good enough reason for the most part. Your only recourse, if elements of my setting piss you off that much, is to vote with your feet.

I change canon slightly to make the game seem new. Darth Vader as a good guy would be a huge change and nothing I'd ever consider. Playing WoD in a post-apocalyptic world is another huge change. What's the point of chaning [sic] the setting that much and still call it game X?

It depends on how hung up on labels we want to be. The RPG hobby has an unfortunate history, starting with TSR as AD&D was coming out, of One True Wayism: either you play it exactly as we tell you to play or you are Not Playing Our Game.

The syndrome doesn't make a lot of sense to me for many reasons, but this one's pertinent to the topic: we are all making this up. "Darth Vader" is a figment of George Lucas' imagination. There IS no "World of Darkness." The kender "race" is a fictional creation. Why is my fudging and/or remolding of someone else's fictional work any different from any Buffy or MERP campaign, where GMs alter and create by the very nature of things?

Furthermore, the day of the "multiverse" in RPG gaming is many years dead now ... peculiarly enough, given how many games are now based around stock settings or milieus, and there really shouldn't be any reason why I can't bring my Jedi Guardian to your d20 Star Wars game.

So as long as I'm not baiting and switching, then, and that players have access to knowledge their characters would reasonably know, there ought not to be an issue. The characters are not omniscient, and have no legitimate way of foreknowledge about Darth Vader's true nature, for example.

 

[Sable Wyvern]

I stick as close to the lore as suits my purposes.

More precisely, I'd say that, as a starting point, I endeavour to stick to official lore exactly, but any time something comes up where that clashes with what I want to achieve, I have no issues taking any liberties I need.

It's probably fair to say that the more invested I am in the setting already, the more likely my intentions are to match what's already written.

 

[Nick J]

All a pre-made setting is to me is a springboard to doing whatever the hell I want with it. Preferably mashing it together with something else to create some weird, but interesting chimera (hopefully).

I probably soured on canonical devotion to "as written" by a group I played D&D with for several years, where they were all huge Forgotten Realms nerds and got pissy if you did anything that diverged too wildly from whatever they had in their heads as the true and proper representation of whatever bits of FR lore they had lodged in their brains from the tie-in novels.

 

[Marktplatz]

The syndrome doesn't make a lot of sense to me for many reasons, but this one's pertinent to the topic: we are all making this up. "Darth Vader" is a figment of George Lucas' imagination. There IS no "World of Darkness." The kender "race" is a fictional creation. Why is my fudging and/or remolding of someone else's fictional work any different from any Buffy or MERP campaign, where GMs alter and create by the very nature of things?

This is one reason I really don't like using the word "canon" or even "lore" for it honestly. None of it is real. None of it has any real or theoretical basis in society or our lives, it's just pure fiction, arbitrary and often random content made up by someone else in a world that doesn't exist and can be boiled down to a soup of words.

But then people will spend days or weeks at a time angrily arguing over the motivations of a character, or what Vader's powers or weaknesses really are, or ranting about something in a story they didn't like or that someone else didn't like something they liked. In fake settings whose consistency depends entirely on you and your group's preference of keeping it.

To paraphrase an age old online wisdom, "Just turn off the screen and walk away lol"

 

[Ravenswing]

Well ... we do, demonstrably, have a need for a term that means "conforms to the creator's intent, as expressed by what hits print/screen/official websites, or as revealed in interviews." "Canon" works as well as any other for that purpose.

 

[Zebraman]

Well ... we do, demonstrably, have a need for a term that means "conforms to the creator's intent, as expressed by what hits print/screen/official websites, or as revealed in interviews." "Canon" works as well as any other for that purpose.

I'd argue that from a RPG GMing point of view "need" is perhaps doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

But even conceding that we want to know the writers intent canon and lore have connotations that are (or have become) unhelpful. "Publisher/author content" would be probably more useful for GMs and players as a term.

 

[VisionStorm]

"None of it is real" is precisely why canon is important in fiction. There needs to be a way to establish what is and isn't consistent with a fictional setting's established lore.

And yes, there are examples of dozens of "official" stories in fiction full of inconsistencies and contradictions. But how much did the writers/filmmakers care about or respect the source material? And how well are those regarded by the fandom?

There's a reason you can't bring up Star Wars without people bringing up how much they hate the prequels and how the sequels don't even exist in their minds.

The reason why canon doesn't matter that much in TTRPGs isn't because "it's fiction, so who cares?" It's because we're not professional writers or filmmakers hired to produce official material for an established IP. We're just playing a game for fun at our own tables and might not even know the lore that well to begin with. And even if we as GM do, our players, who are also participating might not know it that well or play accordingly. Or maybe we want to try whacky stuff like Star Wars gangsters with blaster tommyguns in a nonofficial capacity. So why beat ourselves up about it?

But publish "official" things that go against the canon and be prepared to face the fandom's wrath!

 

[SmallbutVicious]

I think it's remarkably hard to translate fiction into games, because most fiction is able to make places seem mysterious and unknowable. I felt that way about Thieves' World - once you put Sanctuary on a map, especially with a place like the Maze, it just becomes small and disappointing.

Pavis was much more interesting to me from the Griselda stories than the actual city boxed set when I eventually got it. I think that was the death knell of my interest in Glorantha, actually - anything beyond the hints in the core book. I remember an early online map which made the Big Rubble 10 times the size compared to New Pavis, and that felt much better than the official thing.

The lesson, to my mind, is to keep things as vague as possible, adding detail only as and when needed. Preserve that sense of wonder and mystery.

A friend of mine tried to convince me to read the Horus Heresy books, on the basis that they're a good bit of fun. The part of me that remembers reading the fluff in the 2nd edition box set with childlike wonder steadfastly refuses to do so, and I carefully avoid reading anything about what Games Workshop is doing with the idea nowadays. It should be part of the distant, mythical past, drawn in majestic but vague colours. As soon as you start adding details it would become too prosaic.

Well ... we do, demonstrably, have a need for a term that means "conforms to the creator's intent, as expressed by what hits print/screen/official websites, or as revealed in interviews." "Canon" works as well as any other for that purpose.

That kind of works if we're talking about a novel written by one person, but most of the fictional properties people have brought up in this thread are corporate creations that don't really have 'a' creator. What does 'canon' mean in the context of Star Wars? It's not much use asking whether something is canon according to the catechisms of the Roman Catholic church, if your players' view of the world is primarily based on the 90s comics put out by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

 

[S'mon]

"How faithful do you stick to the lore of premade settings?"

I don't think I have a single answer to this, it depends on the campaign. My Forgotten Realms Damara campaign aims to use the 1e Grey Box FR plus FR9 Bloodstone lands as sources, with some reference to FRWiki, but there are contradictions even between the two that I need to resolve. And I use versions of some 3e FR material such as demon queen Soneilon and Impiltur: The Forgotten Kingdom. There is explicitly no Time of Troubles IMC, and the timeline clearly deviates from 1358 DR onwards. The population figures I use for Damara are higher than the FR9 listings but lower than the 3e listings.

Overall, I'm clear that this is my setting, not the official setting. My Wilderlands adds Dragonborn. My 1e/2e-based Forgotten Realms has Goliath, Tieflings and Aasimar - but not Dragonborn or Tabaxi (despite the pleas of my players). In my Golarion, Runelord Karzoug was victorious at the end of Rise of the Runelords and now rules a reborn Thassilon. I'm blending Rob Conley's Blackmarsh with Dragonbane's Misty Vale. And so on.

 

[Uferschnepfe]

As I mentioned in another thread, to make things work the disbelief needs to be suspended.

In a case like Star Trek, I would throw out time travel, mirror universes, Q and to a certain extend holo decks.
These elements never provided a good story and made me cringe.
In the end it would be easier to develop my own universe loosely based on Star Trek/The Orville, throw in some Peter F. Hamilton and have the crew a spacecraft explore a completely new part of their galaxy, instead of having to stick to any original Star Trek RPG.

I'm currently running a Warhammer 4e campaign and use the material as is. The Old World is a well developed place worth exploring.
Writing something similar would be a huge undertaking.
But there is good chance that things will not run the way Cubicle 7 planed them. A lot of elements in the provided material are very restrictive and not well thought through. I give my players much more freedom of choices which will eventually contradict the prewritten material.
This is the way.
Should the campaign take some considerable time, I would go with the Storm of Chaos storyline instead of the End Time. My world , my canon.

 

[Lofgeornost]

It occurs to me that, even with fictional settings I really like, I will sometimes alter some specific elements that seem silly or rub me the wrong way. Some cases in point:

• In A Princess of Mars, Burroughs posited that, because assassination was so rife on Mars, houses were built on barber-chair-like pillars and ascended into the sky at night. I've always found the image ludicrous, and it makes no sense anyway, given that Barsoom has lots of aircraft. So I just edit that element out. Burroughs himself seems largely to have forgotten it in later stories anyway.
• I've recently read through De Camp's stories set in the Pusadian era (his version of Hyboria, if you like) and am wondering about using it in an RPG. But one of the main cities of the setting is named Sederado. I know that my players would immediately start calling it 'Silverado' and asking where Danny Glover and Kevin Kline are. So I'd need to change that name.

 

[Dammit Victor]

I run aggressively anti-canon-- when I run Marvel, I run eXiles, and when I run Star Wars, I run Visions and/or Tales. It's the clearest method I have for telling my players that they don't have to play out the established storylines... because I'm not.

 

[Baulderstone]

Warhammer I stick to the lore, but only the lore circa the first edition RPG/third edition WFB - later stuff i consider non-canon and will draw on individual elements only if I like them

The best thing about Warhammer lore is that for all the detail, it contradicts itself all over the place. I have the benefit of a setting with lots of detail to draw on, but the inconsistencies give me all the freedom I want to contradict canon whenever I feel like it.

 

[chuckdee]

Canon is just a weapon to destroy the status quo!

But really, no setting survives contact with me as a GM.

 

[Fenris-77]

Canon cannon!!

 

[Gabriel]

When you run games in a pre-existing setting, like Warhammer, Greyhawk, Golarion, or Middle-earth, how "faithful" are you to the lore of that setting? Do you play it strict and purist? Do you play it fast and loose and not worry too much about your game's "accuracy"? Do you change things or add your own material, carefully or liberally?

Only as much as required to create a starting common image of the setting between everyone. Once the shared imaginary space is formed, fidelity to the original source material is not as critical. The more fun and interesting your material, the more you can get away with.

Once established, it becomes my world very quickly.

 

[Ravenswing]

But publish "official" things that go against the canon and be prepared to face the fandom's wrath!

Never mind facing the wrath of fans Certain They Know It All. Got an anecdote that at the time boggled my mind. New Line Cinemas, well before casting even began + for the Lord of the Rings movies, set up a fan forum to discuss the effort. Very heavily populated. One incident was when concept art was released. And a large faction of fans went bugfuck at the notion of the Balrog having wings ... something JRRT explicitly said in his text that it HAD. The thread discussing it went over a thousand posts.

+ Don't mind me, still pleased that in the thread discussing casting (where Peter Jackson helpfully released the paragraph's worth of criteria given to the casting director for each significant role), I touted Liv Tyler for Arwen and Sean Bean for Boromir. Don't recall what I suggested for the others ...

 

[thebigh]

Hoo yeah, that rings a bell. I remember that debate getting viciously mocked as, "did Balrogs wear fluffy bunny slippers" too.

 

[Andrew J. Luther]

I’ve never understood the slavish devotion to canon in a campaign you’re actively playing, and I fundamentally disagree with the notion that you may as well play an entirely different setting if you change a couple of things.

I ran a short Star Wars campaign that started right after Return of the Jedi, where Luke killed the Emperor, turned to the dark side, and now ruled the Empire at his father’s side. Leia and Chewbacca had been killed in the battle on Endor, Han was rumoured to have been killed but there was no body, and the rebel fleet was smashed.

The point of the campaign was that a few remnants of the rebellion had to start over from scratch while Luke and Vader trained new Sith force users (as I’ve always thought the Rule of Two was fucking stupid), and any force users in the party had to piece their knowledge together by finding ancient writings.

Now that’s a rather major change to canon, but at no point did the game ever not feel like Star Wars. It was as much Star Wars as anything in the original trilogy.

I feel the same way about people who constantly complain about the high-powered NPCs in the Forgotten Realms “ruining” the setting. They’re nothing more than words on paper and ignoring them does not have any real effect on the setting at the table. The novels may be about those characters but the setting sure as hell isn’t. You could run a great Forgotten Realms campaign for years and never notice that Elminster and Drizzt (and a bunch of others) aren’t around.

 

[Caesar Slaad]

I'm weirdly two-natured about this.

On one hand, I have an irrational fear of buying something I won't be able to use because I got to busy with the sledgehammer to the designers' world, so I'm usually pretty conservative. When I do make changes, I often make them not immediately sensible to the other elements of the setting.

On the other hand, if I don't think I'll ever buy anything for the setting again, because it is no longer supported or because the designers have crossed a line and I don't care any more, all bets are off and I'll change anything.

 

[Ravenswing]

I feel the same way about people who constantly complain about the high-powered NPCs in the Forgotten Realms “ruining” the setting. They’re nothing more than words on paper and ignoring them does not have any real effect on the setting at the table. The novels may be about those characters but the setting sure as hell isn’t. You could run a great Forgotten Realms campaign for years and never notice that Elminster and Drizzt (and a bunch of others) aren’t around.

Quite. I think, though, that the syndrome you describe has to do with the widely held precept that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth, to whom everyone must kowtow or else cower in fear, and the notion of anyone being out there who could tell them what to do is intolerable.

 

[Andrew J. Luther]

Quite. I think, though, that the syndrome you describe has to do with the widely held precept that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth, to whom everyone must kowtow or else cower in fear, and the notion of anyone being out there who could tell them what to do is intolerable.

Probably that’s a part of it. But I often see the complaint being more along the lines of “If there are all these high level NPCs, they can solve any problems and don’t need the PCs to get involved.” I’ve seen that so many times, as if you’re required to include every Harper, every powerful wizard, every protagonist that’s ever appeared in an FR novel or your campaign is somehow wrong.

Luckily, my friends who game feel that’s just as ridiculous as I do. Most of them read The Crystal Shard back in the day, but none of them expect to ever meet those characters no matter how many FR campaigns I run, and wouldn’t even try to find them unless I gave an in-game reason (explicitly told them a rumour about that NPC, or they heard about them from another NPC).

 

[Ravenswing]

Probably that’s a part of it. But I often see the complaint being more along the lines of “If there are all these high level NPCs, they can solve any problems and don’t need the PCs to get involved.” I’ve seen that so many times, as if you’re required to include every Harper, every powerful wizard, every protagonist that’s ever appeared in an FR novel or your campaign is somehow wrong.

Luckily, my friends who game feel that’s just as ridiculous as I do. Most of them read The Crystal Shard back in the day, but none of them expect to ever meet those characters no matter how many FR campaigns I run, and wouldn’t even try to find them unless I gave an in-game reason (explicitly told them a rumour about that NPC, or they heard about them from another NPC).

Which is, of course, moronic. Do Americans really expect (well, sure, of course they whine as if they do) Joe Biden to come down personally and deal with every pothole and every local budgetary shortfall and every policing issue?

Never mind all the reasons why the movers and shakers aren't actually out there moving and shaking. The High King of the Elves, easily the world's most powerful wizard and the next thing to a demi-god, glares over the border at the giant Evil Empire, an authoritarian slave state that occasionally engages in human sacrifice. And what's he going to do about it? It's a realm half again the size of his own, with great armies and masses of their own wizards.

But ultimately, there's another useful principle here. We have a genre based around the premise that a group of characters will team up and do things. As a GM, I neither have the time nor the inclination to cajole diffident players: if players are complaining about having to adventure and looking for excuses not to do so, they can find some other table catering to that ... or else they can go break out a Monopoly board or a deck of cards if RPGs aren't their speed.

 

[AsenRG]

"None of it is real" is precisely why canon is important in fiction. There needs to be a way to establish what is and isn't consistent with a fictional setting's established lore.

Yeah, this.

I just don't, usually, claim to run any setting "verbatim". In fact, odds are very good that I don't remember what exactly was written in the setting book, and remember instead what I had changed as canon...

Unless I really like the setting, that is. But that's a rare case, most of them get the above treatment!
OTOH, most of my changes are usually minor or because I think I've found a better way to represent the ideas of the setting.

But what some writers do with "official products" amounts to "it's not the same setting any more". So in settings that have been subject to it, like Star Wars for a low-hanging example, I tend to specify which official products I've read and approved!
If you don't want to play in Star Wars as shown in the original trilogy and some of the EU books? No problem, you just need another GM.

 

[Fritz]

Not at all faithful. I'll keep what initially interested the players, of course, and anything that provides hooks for adventure or makes my work easier. Sticking to the convoluted canons of premade settings has never made my work easier.

In the 80s my MERP campaign included clockwork cyborgs and mutants. Celebrimbor didn't know what hit him.

 

[Baulderstone]

Yeah, this.

I just don't, usually, claim to run any setting "verbatim". In fact, odds are very good that I don't remember what exactly was written in the setting book, and remember instead what I had changed as canon...

Unless I really like the setting, that is. But that's a rare case, most of them get the above treatment!
OTOH, most of my changes are usually minor or because I think I've found a better way to represent the ideas of the setting.

But what some writers do with "official products" amounts to "it's not the same setting any more". So in settings that have been subject to it, like Star Wars for a low-hanging example, I tend to specify which official products I've read and approved!
If you don't want to play in Star Wars as shown in the original trilogy and some of the EU books? No problem, you just need another GM.

Star Wars fits with my comments about Warhammer. The "canon" has sprawled in so many contradictory directions that the GM has to pick and choose. It would be nonsense for a Star Wars GM to simply say, "It's true. All of it."

 

[AsenRG]

Star Wars fits with my comments about Warhammer. The "canon" has sprawled in so many contradictory directions that the GM has to pick and choose. It would be nonsense for a Star Wars GM to simply say, "It's true. All of it."

Yes, I was agreeing with you.

 

[Fritz]

Star Wars fits with my comments about Warhammer. The "canon" has sprawled in so many contradictory directions that the GM has to pick and choose. It would be nonsense for a Star Wars GM to simply say, "It's true. All of it."

Dr. Julian Bashir : You've given me answers all right; but they were all different. What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?

Elim Garak : My dear Doctor, they're all true.

Dr. Julian Bashir : Even the lies?

Elim Garak : Especially the lies

 

[arjunstc]

Dr. Julian Bashir : You've given me answers all right; but they were all different. What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?

Elim Garak : My dear Doctor, they're all true.

Dr. Julian Bashir : Even the lies?

Elim Garak : Especially the lies

Of all the characters on DS9 Garak was the most honest... to his own true self.

 

[thebigh]

Just plain, simple Garak.

 

[Winterblight]

I'm definitely in the 'it depends' camp. It depends on a lot of things.

It depends on what I enjoy
It depends on what I know
It depends on what my players enjoy
It depends on what my players know (and how much I want to annoy them)
It depends on how familiar I am with a genre
It depends on how integrated the rules are with the setting.

As quick examples. I tend to run Earthdawn as is with a few tweaks based on location. Shadowrun mostly as it is, but ignore some of the bigger events as I tend to run street-level campaigns. Dragon Age, I've all but completely ditched the setting and just use the map and some of the place names.

 

[AppleJax]

I don’t. I’m completely burned out on canon, especially in ttrpgs.

When I’m writing my own setting, I don’t really have a canon. I have some vague genre precepts that I structure my writing around. I’m only interested in creating entertaining scenarios.

Writing an elaborate metaplot goes counter to that and quickly becomes unwieldy, pretentious, and ego-stroking garbage.

 

[Mankcam]

I don’t. I’m completely burned out on canon, especially in ttrpgs.

When I’m writing my own setting, I don’t really have a canon. I have some vague genre precepts that I structure my writing around. I’m only interested in creating entertaining scenarios.

Writing an elaborate metaplot goes counter to that and quickly becomes unwieldy, pretentious, and ego-stroking garbage.

One of the reasons I'm running Numenera and not RuneQuest at present is that any Ninth World metaplot is quite easy to keep as background canvas, and it's way, way in the background - I could do this for RuneQuest, but Glorantha just feels like an increasing lore pit these days.
I'm happily just going to have fun getting old D&D modules for plot frameworks and retrapping them as I please for Numenera, with old dungeons becoming ancient scientific facilities, opponent species getting retrapped, magic becoming nanoscience, magic items becoming ancient tech, monsters getting the weird scifi fantasy treatment, etc etc.
I've taken some inspiration from Sly Flourish, but Michael O'Shea is much more structured than I am.
I'm basically just rambling on episode to episode the way I used to run my games in my teens, and it's just so liberating to do it this way again

 

[EmperorNorton]

The best thing about Warhammer lore is that for all the detail, it contradicts itself all over the place. I have the benefit of a setting with lots of detail to draw on, but the inconsistencies give me all the freedom I want to contradict canon whenever I feel like it.

This is one of the things I really liked about 1e L5R lore. All the clan books lore sections were written from in universe perspective, so they can contradict each other easily because all of them are written form a certain point of view.

Is the Scorpion clan book telling you that black pajama ninjas are stupid and don't really exist because they are letting you in on the secret? Or is he telling you that to hide the fact that they really do exist?

It gave you plenty of information, while still giving the GM the room to decide which parts are true to his game world.

 

[Weru]

It gave you plenty of information, while still giving the GM the room to decide which parts are true to his game world.

This is how I like to write setting stuff, have it be almost mythic, contradictory, told by biased factions, and unreliable narrators. That way I don't even have to stick to lore in my own settings.

As kids, me and my mates loved playing MERP and RQ, but as we were snot-nosed kids, and we played them pretty much the same way we played B/X and T&T. Kill everything, and Monty Haul it 100%. Nuance and dedication to deep lore were not our forte. We had a ton of fun.

These days, I feel like there's too much to learn, and too many deep deep lore-bores out there. Plus, the internet makes Fannon tedious, at best, toxic at worst. I wouldn't want to run any Glorantha, Middle Earth, Trek, or Star Wars now. It's easier and more fun to make your own setting or file off the serial numbers and play the 'Supermarket Own-Brand' equivalent of Trek, or whatever.

 

[AsenRG]

I don’t. I’m completely burned out on canon, especially in ttrpgs.

When I’m writing my own setting, I don’t really have a canon.

...OK, in that we differ. I don't see the need to stick to canon, but once I decide what's true in-universe, I'm sticking to it like a used chewing gum to a heavy-duty sole!

 

[AppleJax]

To be fair, I do respect the lore in Chaosium’s Nephilim. Mostly because they rewrote it to be way less intrusive than the original French version. The French version had elaborate metaplot and famous figures with global reach, such as each Major Arcanum (the occult schools available to PCs, which were all nominally allied) having its own “Prince” and meeting every few centuries at a Major Conclave. The US adaptation made everything decentralized and didn’t have famous NPCs that everyone was aware of going globe trotting all the time solving major metaplot events. The one adventure book and hooks in another book implied that all sorts of crazy X-Files stuff constantly goes on everywhere that even most of the occult scene isn’t aware of, which I find very interesting. The “canonical” plot hooks include things like dinosaur clones taking over the facility that created them, an Aztec demon lord being summoned by accident and going on a serial murder spree, or an immortal arriving from space in a meteor with entirely new magical elements in its makeup. In addition to more conventional hooks like searching for the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant a la Indiana Jones.

I really like that approach. While there are guidelines for how the setting typically operates, the writers don’t let this constrain you and I appreciate the efforts to show what kind of bizarre stuff the GM is free to devise.

Since the line was canceled and unfinished, I have no choice but to invent stuff for the things they didn’t get a chance to explore. Like the setting’s vampire equivalents: I’m translating from the 2001 third edition of the French because that has the most robust rules, using the surviving notes for the canceled US supplement as much as possible, and adding my own stuff to fill gaps and fix perceived flaws.

 

[AsenRG]

To be fair, I do respect the lore in Chaosium’s Nephilim. Mostly because they rewrote it to be way less intrusive than the original French version.
(...)
I really like that approach. While there are guidelines for how the setting typically operates, the writers don’t let this constrain you and I appreciate the efforts to show what kind of bizarre stuff the GM is free to devise.

OK, then it's kinda the same approach. I mean, maybe I wouldn't rewrite it because of the uber-powerful NPCs, or maybe I would, but how many changes I decide to make to a setting depends just on what I believe would make for a better setting.
The point is, once I make a decision on that account, I'm sticking to it.