Canon Discontinuity/Tabletop Games

Sometimes, even DMs get railroaded by the publishers who make their cherished games. When the canon plot is going south, nothing works quite as well as taking an entire RPG world off the rails. It's hard to pinpoint what sorts of things people will accept in Tabletop RPGs, but rest assured whenever there's a rules change, someone is going to be unhappy.

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• For those who never saw them originally, the Squats are simply Canon Discontinuity and an endless source of fun at official GW events.
  • Technically, Black Library isn't canon when it contradicts lore established in the official Codices, so this trope is only tenuously applicable to Black Library. It's like feeling the need to ignore fanfiction.
  • Everything published by Games Workshop (Which includes Black Library) is canon. This is indisputable fact. Everything they put out is canon. Not everything that is canon is, however, true.
    • To clarify, it is assumed that many of the pieces of work are written by Imperial scholars, and thus the book you're reading could be true, or it could be nothing but propaganda the Imperium has made up, or a plethora of other things.
• Greyhawk: Something that nobody ever seems to understand... the S series modules (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, White Plume Mountain and especially Tomb of Horrors) were never intended to be actual adventure modules. The books told you that in the front. They were special convention modules where you were handed a pre-made set of characters and the idea was to live as long as you can. They really are not part of the actual setting.
• Exalted:
  • Zeal does not exist. There are other elements of Exalted that some of the fans prefer not to think about, but Zeal is the one that absolutely everyone agrees on, by virtue of its sheer ungodly brokenness. Void Avatar Prana is a close runner up. As of errata in mid '10, the writers agree: Zeal does not exist.
  • Similarly, no one liked the 1st edition Lunars book, mainly because it painted the entire group as a bunch of rampaging barbarians dedicated to tearing down civilization. Which is why they got a radical reboot in 2nd Ed; the whole "tear down civilization" bit is limited to a few batshit crazy members, and most of the Lunars are dedicated to making a new civilization outside of the models of the Solar Deliberative and the Realm.
    • ...Which is, in turn, on its way out due to an oversaturation of secret masters of Creation and the 2e history of the Lunars being written to make everyone seem like an asshole with no redeeming features at all, number one case in point being the presentation of the Unconquered Sun as a tyrannical maniac with regard to Solar Bond (though the lack of other, similar accounts in the manuals for Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals, and the origin stories of the Incarnae in Glories of the Most High point to a more benign origin). The aforementioned problems may be slow to motively anger the readers on account of the second edition lacking a massive, ugly Lunar Charm cloud with a perfect dodge based on Charisma.
  • Also, pretty much the entire first half of Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals, due to a spectacular failure of communication. To quote Rand Brittain of rpg.net: "The word from those in the know is that Infernals left out the first four chapters. Not sure why that happened."
  • There is also a bit of disagreement over the existence of Sidereal Martial Arts, as described in the Scroll of the Monk (a much-maligned product and Old Shame of writer Dean Shomshak). Some disbelieve them entirely, others use some, but revoke the blatantly game-breaking or badly written ones (like Quicksilver Hand of Dreams).
    • The writers, on the other hand-including the lead one of that book-have decided that the book itself was simply never written. The Ink Monkeys have gone on record as saying it does not exist beyond an example of not reading the rules before making a book.
  • At one point in Compass of Celestial Directions: Malfeas, there's a piece of background that badly strains the "no resurrections or time travel" rule. The fans immediately took this down to the back paddock and shot it, and the writers later dug its grave.
• Wizards of the Coast downgraded the Magic: The Gathering set "Homelands" to not-worth-the-cardboard-it's-printed-on status when it "completed" the Ice Age block with Coldsnap. Most fans had already demoted it to that status years earlier.
  • Of course, the printing of plane cards referring to the Homelands setting and creatures like "Barony Vampire" in the base set indicates that Wizards isn't quite done with Ulgrotha yet - they just wanted to get it the hell away from any other Magic settings.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: UDE would like to convince duelists that there is no such thing as the OCG or Konami, and Konami vice-versa, but most intelligent duelists are ignoring them and drowning out their perpetual feud with campfire songs around YVD.
• Fans of Paranoia like to pretend that the much-maligned Paranoia Fifth Edition doesn't exist. In fact, the writers of the "Paranoia XP" edition (from Mongoose Publishing) have declared the Fifth Edition an "un-product" (rather appropriate for a darkly humorous game about a dystopia).
  • The Computer is also adamant in assuring all Citizens that it has never Crashed, and that all events surrounding the Crash are malignant rumors concocted by Commie Mutant Traitors. And paying any attention to rumors is, of course, treason.
    • As is spreading them, comrade.
• When White Wolf screwed up with the Old World of Darkness, they'd often try to correct the biggest disasters by destroying all involved and making sure they would not rise from the ashes. Examples:
  • Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand for Vampire: The Masquerade, which "revealed" that most vampires were possessed by evil spirits, and featured a "liberated" group called the True Black Hand that fought against them. By the time Third Edition came up, said group was wiped out entirely after it was revealed that they'd gotten everything wrong.
  • Samuel Haight started off as a villainous NPC for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, a disgruntled Kinfolk who ended up killing five werewolves so that he could become one in a blasphemous ritual. This was good. Then he got his hands on an artifact that let him use Awakened magic. This was bad. Then he became a ghoul and started learning vampiric Disciplines. This was worse. Finally, a book came out devoted entirely to killing him, and the minute his soul arrived in the afterlife, it was taken and forged into an ashtray.
  • In first edition WOD, a vampire could make other vampires of both animals and werewolves. Second edition WOD plainly admits that the former ("vampire dogs") is stupid and the latter hybrid overpowered, so disallows both. While vampire-werewolf isn't strictly non-existant, it is certain death for the werewolf and, if it doesn't die immediately, then likely death for everyone around it including the vampire who embraced it first. Werewolves so outmatch vampires in a straight fight that using this is actually considered a legitimate, if last ditch, anti-werewolf tactic.
• GURPS Traveller disavows the Rebellion (from MegaTraveller) and the Virus (from Traveller: The New Era). Other recent Traveller products keep the Rebellion and ditch the Virus, or keep both (fans and players are similarly split; see Broken Base).
  • Well, it doesn't so much disavow the Rebellion as present a Traveller Elseworlds where it failed. An obscure mention in the GURPS Traveller core sourcebook reveals that Archduke Dulinor died in a 'shuttle crash' on his way down to Sylea's planetary surface, the day he was to have his fateful audience with the Emperor. It isn't explicitly said that the shuttle crashed because an Imperial black ops squad put several kilos of high explosive in the engine, but its kinda hinted. The accompanying sidebar explicitly says 'We're doing an alternate-universe Traveller, not the main one'.
• Writers for TSR went so far as to mention explicitly in a reboot continuity guide for the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons that Greyhawk Ruins was to be considered the official version of Castle Greyhawk and not the pretty dated and unfunny parody module Castle Greyhawk.
• Because no one's entirely sure if the Chaos God Malal from Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 is owned by Games Workshop or the comic book author who introduced him to the franchise, GW dropped all mention of him from their gamebooks to be on the safe side.
  • GW might not mention Malal by name, but he still gets a few references. For example there's a Chaos Space Marine warband called "Sons of Malice" that wears Malal's colours and the rulebook for the spinoff game Inquisitor includes a weapon very similar to the ones champions of Malal use in the list of daemon weapons.
    • He also appears in one of the short story collections GW released, though he is know as "Malice" there.
  • Speaking of Warhammer 40,000, the Squats have been stricken from all records due to a shift towards a "more serious" direction. Current canon is that did exist, but only just long enough to be entirely eaten by Tyranids.
    • Black Library author Dan Abnett has some fun with this in his Ravenor series. When Sholto Unwerth reveals his Squat ancestry, Ravenor says that he's never heard of them, and Sholto notes that most people think they were just a myth.
  • By the third edition, the Star Child and attendant background elements introduced in Slaves to Darkness had been officially stricken, with a note in the corebook that the "Star Child cult" was a minor Tzeentchian cult that had been obliterated.
    • For those unfamiliar; the Star Child belief was that, basically, The Emperor of Mankind was the reincarnated gestalt of a thousand pre-Chaos Gods human psykers and that, when he was struck down by Horus, all of his compassion, hope, love, and other positive elements of self were cast into the Warp to become a gestating nascent god, the so-called Star Child. A secret conspiracy of ex-daemonhosts (people who had been possessed by daemons, but then cast them out, often through the aid of the Eldar) called the Illuminati were working to find the Sensei, immortal, sterile offspring of the Emperor of whom the Emperor himself was ignorant in hopes that by gathering them all and sacrificing them the Star Child could be infused with the power to awaken as a new God-Emperor to rule mankind.
• Karona meeting Yawgmoth, apparently still alive, in the Scourge novel has been Retconned as having been an impostor.
  • Or It could have been a Psychic Dream of the past.
• ALL of the Eberron Tie-in Novels are considered non-canon. For that matter, all modules are as well and the only references to any of them are their direct sequels. This is in keeping with Eberron's policy of not advancing the story so the player characters are the ones that shine, not Elminster or the like.
• The Ravenloft novel Lord of the Necropolis has been sealed in the earth below canonicity with an Imprisonment spell for the rest of time for breaking the first rule of the Demiplane of Dread - you do not reveal the nature of the Dark Powers.

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