Should it be considered non-canon?

[robject]

SUGGEST SOME MORE!

Are some published Traveller books partly or completely non-canonical?

Lots of stuff published for Traveller. Some of it, in my mind, is suspect. I try to keep an open mind, though. But I want to spark a discussion over specific books.

If you've got a book that you think might not be canon, tell me, and I'll add it to this poll, and we'll see what people think about it.

 

[whulorigan]

Apparently GT: Behind the Claw was accidentally published from a Draft version instead of the Final Release candidate, and has errors, if my understanding is correct.

 

[whulorigan]

For Paranoia Press: Scouts and Assassins, I always liked the idea of using the Scouts presented there as the Grand Duchy of Trelyn's version of the IISS, the RDTS (Royal Duchy of Trelyn Scouts) operating in and around the Vanguard Reaches and The Beyond.

GURPS Traveller: Behind the Claw has some good ideas to mine, but you just need to be careful that you don't create unintentional canon conflicts, if that is important to your campaign. Some of its world descriptions also are at odds with some previously published canonical and non-canonical material (Mertactor for example).

 

[robject]

I tried to think of more books to add for consideration. Any thoughts?

 

[whulorigan]

I tried to think of more books to add for consideration. Any thoughts?

Well, the section at the back of the T4: Core Rules has a starmap of Sylea's home subsector that is completely at odds with TravellerMap and all other renditions of the Core Sector, AFAIK. That is not an entire book, of course, just one section.

 

[mike wightman]

It all depends upon what sort of setting you want to build - and of course MWM deciding what is and isn't canon.

Everything produced by GDW or marketed as such for CT is canonical - but not necessarily OTU setting canon. Even stuff that is tablet of stone canon is contradictory to other canon material.

There is a huge dichotomy between setting and rules.

How much MT setting material should be ditched due to it being totally implausible and not worthy of canon status - how about TNE and T4 material. Then there is MgT - how much of their 3I line should be considered canon?

By the way are we allowed to discuss this stuff in the open considering board rules and recent events?

 

[nobby-w]

I think the hermeneutic does a pretty good job of explaining what is considered canon for the purposes of publishers, which are the folks canon was designed for.

'Canon is for publishers' said MWM at one point, or words to that effect. It's there to stop people from publishing things that are in conflict or incompatible with other published material. As I understand, that's really the be-all and end-all of its reason for existence. Unless you're planning to publish licensed OTU material everything else is house rules.

Having said that, there's no reason not to take some care to ensure your own material doesn't conflict with OTU canon. If you want to put something up on (for example) COTI then it does help if it plays nicely with the other published material. I've even done that with stuff I wrote, although I've had the nearly all of the LBBs for 30+ years and I'm familiar enough with them to do that without a lengthy research exercise. If you weren't so familiar it might not be worth the effort as it's a significant body of material to trawl through.

I'm tempted to say that this question has already been done to death and documented quite well. When I see a thread devolve into wittering about the minutae of OTU canon it makes me die a little inside.

If I was writing something for publication I would use the list of stuff in the Hermeneutic as a starting point to avoid clashes. Following that I might try to make it fit in with third party materials but I might not get so worked up. If Marc or someone with a vested interest interest in the integrity of the OTU canon argued about something I wrote then I would engage them and see what might be done to resolve the issue. In real publishing circles - especially those related to incumbent franchises - to-ing and fro-ing about this sort of stuff is par for the course. Lucasfilm has someone on the staff whose job it is to coordinate this for third party Star Wars material.

Of course, I'm not publishing licenced OTU material at this point so the question is moot.

 

[Timerover51]

I understand that Adventure 4: Leviathan, was produced by Games Workshop in England, however it does bear the following statement.

This booklet is an adventure intended for use with Traveller, GDW's science-fiction role-playing game set in the far future.

The copyright on it is 1980, so it was before the 1981 edition of the Little Black Books. GDW, and apparently Marc, accepted it as canon at that point in time. Is it canon for the 1981 edition, probably not is some aspects, such as the message torpedoes, but at the time of publishing, it was canon. Clearly, it can be questioned now, but then so could a lot of the material that was published by GDW at that time, based on later versions of the rules.

Besides, I always liked the adventure, having bought it in hard copy those many years ago. Unless the players had a copy, they could not be quite sure what they were going to run into.

 

[mike wightman]

A4 is canon for the OTU as it existed when A4 was written.

LBB1-3 77 - check
a frontier sector that is still being explored and developed as per the proto Spinward marches of S3 - check

The powers that be changed the setting, making much of the stuff in A4 ridiculous.

No jump torps - written out of the game
A totally unexplored sector adjacent to a subsector that has been settled by the Imperium for over a thousand years - snapity snap snap snap.

 

[Grav_Moped]

... and unarmored 600-ton fighter carriers ("patrol frigates") as major combatant vessels, because you had to trade off size for performance at lower tech levels, and size didn't provide much combat advantage aside from resiliency against drive and fuel hits. Only with LBB5 did size alone enable more firepower; before that, carried craft were the only way to get more than 3 weapons/100Td.

 

[creativehum]

My guess is (and I am very confident in this guess) the entire notion of canon did not exist at all at the start of the hobby in the sense it is often a concern today.

That is, not only is "canon is a moving target through the development of the setting" as Mike points out, but I don't think anyone in the first four years of CT's development gave much thought at all to matter.

So, to robject's question we are only left with the questions: What is the canon today? What books contradict that canon?

This is a side topic, but I'm actually very curious when the notion of "canon" arrived in nerdom. In RPGs specially and in SF/Fantasy stories, TV, and movies in general. I just realized it isn't a concert at all I remember from my youth.

 

[BRJN]

This isn't a problem with canon but an internal inconsistency:

SORAG allows you to create a James Bond -like character. At the end of character creation you encounter a long in-game warning that if anybody ever suspects that you used any of your unusual skills, everybody from 001 to 009 (including your replacement as 007) will hunt you down and try to kill you.

Tell me again why I want to create a character from this origin?

 

[robject]

I suspect that 'canon' as specifically applied to books, entertainment and media, is older than RPGs.

 

[robject]

Don McKinney couldn't cleanly sort out canon from non-canon.

And I implicitly admit bias. The new aliens in Behind the Claw are wrong.

Marc, I think, forced Don to be more open than he would've been, by assuming that if it's published, it's canon, with a short list of exceptions.

Maybe my next poll will be on an Exceptions List, instead of a Publications List.

 

[mike wightman]

Do you want setting canon? A setting without the contradictions, mutually exclusive technology changes, parameter switches and paradigm shifts.

A lot of the rules specific mechanics make a lot of stuff non-canon. Is T5 the last word on OTU technology canon? Are T5 rule systems the last word in how the OTU works at the PCs perspective?

Get the Galaxiad out the door and give us a setting written for T5.

Otherwise you get the unholy self contradictory mess that is the Traveller corpus

The proto-OTU is close to using the LBB1-3 rules as written, but there are significant differences - the OTU from its first days did not use the rules as written.
The additional rulebooks, supplements, adventures and JTAS articles that changed the nature of the OTU still include the dichotomy between LBB1-3 et al 81 revision letter drives and HG drive tables - even the Traveller Adventure that definitely uses the tropes to be found in HG 80 uses letter drives for every ship in the book, as do all of the Alien Modules bar K'kree.

The Rebellion era and rules of MT changed the tech paradigm, so while the setting may be considered canonical the technology can not. In a similar vein while the setting for TNE is canonical the rules are so different, the technology so wildly different that none of that can be considered canon.


Defining what you mean by canon is crucial to this discussion - is it setting canon or compatibility with a certain rules edition?

 

[aramis]

Apparently GT: Behind the Claw was accidentally published from a Draft version instead of the Final Release candidate, and has errors, if my understanding is correct.

DonM repeatedly noted it wasn't even to be crosschecked against...

It's almost as bad a job as MT's Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium... which said, is just about THE worst 1st-party book for any traveller edition.

Marc has gone back and forth on Jump Torps... I think they're still verboten, so that puts A1 and A4 on the "Parts are non-canonical"... or, to a creative GM, they're a fraud perpetrated upon hapless crew by high command.

 

[nobby-w]

I suspect that 'canon' as specifically applied to books, entertainment and media, is older than RPGs.

Nitpicky theological arguments have been going for pretty much as long as organised religion. There are certainly plenty of records of this sort of thing happening in several religions. One could even put that interpretation on some classical works that we still have records of.

Cannon and internal consistency was not a significant issue for media or even book series writers until perhaps the 1980s. Marvel was probably the first large scale publisher to have significant issues with internal consistency, and the plot convolutions their writers came up with to dig themselves out of holes are quite legendary.

I don't think any of the major media franchises identified a need to manage their canon until well into the 1980s or 1990s. The first real example of geeky fans that media producers ever had to deal with were trekkies. TV franchises avoided multi-episode story arcs because the networks couldn't be relied upon to air the episodes in order anyway.

Lucasfilm was the first major media publisher that really went to any effort to wrangle consistency amongst third party writers and publishers, and even then they did not recognise a need to do so until the 1990s. Up until the publication of Zahn's Admiral Thrawn books, Lucasfilm had viewed Star Wars as a legacy franchise, winding down its value. It wasn't until afterwards that they realised they had a requirement to manage their canon amongst third party publishers.

I'm not sure when MWM started to actively manage canon amongst Traveller publishers, but it didn't get much airing on the TML until well into the 1990s or even 2000s.

 

[creativehum]

I actually did a long dive into the notion of canon in entertainment media with friends today, scouring our memories and the internet -- and came to the same conclusions:Marvel. Star Wars. The early to mid 80s as a starting point.

The only earlier notion of canon involving "nailing down a fictional setting/characters into some sort of consitant reality" we found was "The Sherlockian Game" in the first half of the 20th century. In The Game authors and fans of Doyle's Holmes stories would write mock essays and scholarly works in the style of studies of the Bible used to poke holes in the Bible for inconsistencies, or find rationalizations for such "errors" to support the Bible as a sound truth. The whole thing was a lark mostly having a grand time by taking too seriously something that should not be taken too seriously.

By contrast, we might look at the Cthulhu Mythos... created by Lovecraft. But Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (among others) borrowed freely from it for their weird fantasy stories, adding new details, and Lovecraft drew on their work. No one bothered to created some sort of unified reality or cross-reference all the creative shenanigans. It was a big bag of ideas that people drew from and put donations into. Arguments about what was "canon" or really Mythos or not would come decades later.

I really do think some thing happened in the early 80s, a confluence of something new -- RPG settings, convoluted Marvel plotting, and the juggernaut of the Star Wars IP in which a setting was proven to be valuable in cash flow in a way no other setting had ever been.

I haven't been able to sort out a lot of the whys and hows, or the motivations of a certain segment of genre fandom that fed this desire for "canon" so fiercely. But as far as the timeline and original sources, I think nobby-w pretty much nailed it.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

It all depends upon what sort of setting you want to build - and of course MWM deciding what is and isn't canon.
...
How much MT setting material should be ditched due to it being totally implausible and not worthy of canon status - how about TNE and T4 material. Then there is MgT - how much of their 3I line should be considered canon?

:coffeesip:
Or in light of Agent of the Imperium and the Empress Wave, the Domain of Deneb in TNE and 1248?

 

[infojunky]

What is this Canon you speak of?

In that material for a game is Material for a game, period.