Play Is Canon
All my homies like blorb. Or specifically some of my most handsome and articulate friends. And they have great points, and I have always enjoyed the games I’ve played with them. But with such a long wind-up, you already know a sinister “but” is coming. Blorb is cool, BUT it does not exactly mesh with the way I prefer to run my campaigns, especially the longer ones that tend to accrete lore like barnacles on an old ship rather than any intentional effort on my part.
I am no OSR-purebred. I’m a bit of a mutt and enjoy plenty of storygames (as I’ve argued many times, but perhaps not on this blog because it is so inside-baseball, storygames and OSR are not the rivals some of their early promoters set them up as. They’re cousins and share plenty of DNA). And before I was playing either OSR-likes, storygames, or even brand-name D&D, I was performing improv theatre. That’s why I’m so fucking goofy. But it’s also given me so many valuable refereeing skills that I unfortunately can’t just write up. Some lessons can’t be read out of a book. But I digress, the reason all that is relevant is that some of my favorite sessions have more in a writers’ room direction than the typical OSRy game. There is a spectrum (many such cases) that games can fall in that range between full Bedtime Story Mode where the referee is essentially narrating events to a table of players to full Writers’ Room Mode where everyone at the table is bouncing ideas off each other, building off the ideas of their fellow players and collectively deciding which ideas are the ones that actually happen in the narrative. Both modes are reductive, and if your game is too extreme in either direction, it may cease to be recognizable as a tabletop game for most of us, i.e., few people play wholly in one mode. But OSR-style play tends to be more on the bedtime story side of the spectrum. Storygames tend toward the writers’ room side and benefit from a high level of creative collaboration. I’d say my games tend to sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, ebbing mostly on the temperament of my fellow players at any given session. For a more concrete example of this in practice, see my worldbuilding procedure I use during Session Zeroes. This is as writer-room as my sessions ever get, and it moves back toward the bedtime story mode after that initial kickstart, but even that shared worldbuilding is not to the taste of many more mainline OSR practitioners.
Because my games are somewhat outside the OSR norm, the blorb principals have never fully aligned with how I run my games. Luke Rejec’s anti-canon worldbuilding (post currently unavailable, so the link is to an archive) was a big inspiration to me when I was taking baby steps into the 2020 version of the OSR, which is obvious from some of my earliest blog posts. But it doesn’t perfectly describe how I run my games either. Rather than just saying that my approach lies somewhere in between the poles represented by blorb and anti-canon, I think it is more helpful to outline my own “tiers of truth” (similar to the exercise Liche's Libram performed, albeit coming to a slightly different formulation).
As a preface to the below, #2, #4 and #5 below are the same conceptually as the three tiers of truth in the original blorb post. So the difference is that my top-tier truth is not encompassed (directly) in blorb nor is the “writers’ room” aspect that comes out in #3. Tiers #1 and #3 are more similar to what you might see in a strictly anti-canon approach.
My Tiers of Truth for Tabletop Tales
No two worlds, even if ostensibly the same setting, are the same, and each game session can (and perhaps should) change your world. Whenever there is a conflict about what is “canon” for your world, follow the below order of authority, with the highest taking precedence.
Spoken at the Table without Dissent. Even an offhand statement made in a previous session, if it is serious, makes sense to everyone else, and no one else disagrees with it, establishes a Truth about the world, whether delivered by the referee (as is traditional) or even another player.
The Referee’s Prep. Whatever the referee prepared before the session or before a previous session, which hasn’t yet been contradicted by a Tier 1 Truth. Prep only becomes established as a Tier 1 Truth only once they actually come up in play.
Ask the Players. The referee may ask one of the players, especially if it is something relating to their character or about which their character has specialized knowledge. If a question about dwarven culture comes up that wasn’t already established as Tier 1 or 2 Truths, try asking the player whose character is a dwarf and see if they have an idea. Once they give their idea seriously, it makes sense and no one contradicts it, it can then be established as a Tier 1 Truth.
The Sacred Texts. All that is written in the book(s) (be they the rules, the setting, the adventure, whatever) (which, it goes without saying, may not be a book at all. Maybe it’s a blog or you’re playing a Calvinball game). The books should ideally help give the referee a baseline for their world (if not, jettison it) and is likely to be incorporated into the referee’s preparations.
Make Something Up. If all else fails, just pull something from the top of your head or from out of your ass. Once you speak it at the table, however, it becomes a Tier 1 Truth, so tread lightly.
The big takeaway is that the most important thing is not actually prep by itself and certainly isn’t whatever a rulebook decrees. It’s the result of actual play that happens at the table. Never lose sight of that. Play is the point.
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