On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 20:17:51 +0000 (UTC), Phil Pugliese wrote:

>And that is exactly why all the various disputes about canon (Canon Wars?  ;-)  ), are really kinda' silly.
>In the TU, 'canon' comes & goes, ephemeral & transitory.
>IMO, it's primary purpose seems to be to provide bragging rights.
>More than once I've been curtly informed that, "You can write whatever you want but I assure you my <whatever> is CANON(tm)"!

It's pretty clear now that it's time to repost The Rant...

(This is lightly edited from an October 2010 lightly-edited repost of a
February 2006 lightly-edited repost of a post from August 2003, some of
which were over signatures of mine from other accounts.)

Of late, there has been verbiage expended on the topic of Canon, and what
is and is not 'canonical', and who has claimed that Canon status can or
cannot be applied to particular releases of Our Game.  I think that some of
the folks expending the verbiage are forgetting that which is of critical
importance in any discussion of Canon...

Canon is for Authors
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An Author is not an ordinary person; an Author is someone who is writing
material that will be Given the Imprimatur.  Such people cannot with
impunity go against What Has Been Established, for the Imprimatur says to
one and all, "This is part of What Has Been Established.".  Thus, all
Authors need to be familiar with the material under the Imprimatur, that
is, the Canon.

Most of the people on the list are not Authors - although we are blessed
with the presence of some who _are_ Authors, and even with those who may
Give the Imprimatur.

For players, all rôle-playing games are is an evolution of "Let's Pretend":
"Let's pretend that I'm a cowboy and you're an indian and I'm gonna stop
you from scalping the women of the town and bang! bang! I shot you and
you're dead -- "  "Am not!  You missed!"  "Did not! Cheater!"  "Did too!
Cheater yourself!"...

All that the funny dice do is provide an impartial arbiter of whether or
not you missed. All that the pages and pages of rules do is provide the
information you need to understand what the dice are telling you.  And all
that the pages and pages of source material do is provide Imagination,
collected and distilled, to establish the context in which to interpret the
dice to determine whether you really did miss...

And no, none of that is trivial, else we'd never have had the "You missed!"
"Did not!" arguments when we Pretended before we started RPGing.  But it's
still that simple.

What then does non-canon status of material mean?  It simply means that the
material in question need not be considered when an Author writes to
Receive the Imprimatur.  If what an Author writes has nothing to do with
the uncanonical material (as in a Solomani Rim sourcebook not needing to
consider the astrography of the Glimmerdrift Reaches), then the canon
status of the material is of no moment.  If the Author writes about what is
covered by the uncanonical material, however, it becomes important - for
Canon must be followed, and the Story shoehorned into the material that Has
Gone Before - but if the material is not canonized, the Author need not
fiddle with the Story to fit the material, but may change the material to
fit the Story, without fear of Losing the Imprimatur thereby.  If the
Author chooses to write his Story such that the de-canonized material is
still accurate, then none will criticise him thusfor, nor if he choose
otherwise, and write the material anew and differently.

To a player (which includes the Referee, the arbiter of the reality of the
Story), the canon status of any material is Irrelevant.  For the player,
the first rule of the Rôle-Playing Game is "An ye like it not, CHANGE IT!".
Canon or not, the Referee is Telling a Story, Interactively, and the Story
is All.  The conformance to Canon is a convenience, not a necessity, and
when the Canon status of material, or the lack thereof, outrages us,
nonconformance may well be a Mandate.

Then to what purpose the discussion of Canon?  "...Imagination, collected
and distilled,..." The discussion of which we partake on the list is part
of the process of collection and distillation, providing a common basis for
sharing our Imagination, and a leaping-off point for our own Imaginations
to take hold, and create that which we describe with the acronym "IMTU". To
do this without reference to what has Received the Imprimatur, however
unlikely the events so portrayed may be, would make our shared experience
that much more difficult to achieve; thus, the Canon provides that common
base upon which to build - and build we do (must, some would say), else
would the formulation "IMTU" be devoid of meaning.  Even so, Canon must
always defer to IMTU in the final analysis, for when we play, we make
Traveller _our_ Game, and none shall gainsay us that power.

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Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2020. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.

--
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Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
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