Loose Canons

Canon. What was and was not canon in fiction was once the domain of a humble few, limited to the letters sections of comic books, the back pages of fanzines, and late-night arguments in the earliest fan conventions. The internet changed that, turning ordinary fans of movies, comics, television, and games into lore experts willing to argue as passionately (or vehemently) as the most hard-nosed academic. Nerd culture then fused with pop culture, and a thousand fandom wikis later, we live in a world obsessed with canon.

But before canon, there was... loose canon? Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft created stories in which shared gods lurked in the background, manifesting in different ways. An unfulfilled backdoor pilot in the original Star Trek show became a weird element of lore 60 years later. Elminster visited modern day earth! The loose mythologies of the worlds of Stephen King and Michael Moorcock are also fine examples.

A player in one game I ran created a character that was, in part, a callback to the nickname of an adventuring party from a previous game. The two games were completely unrelated; they were run in different systems. It would not be possible to “travel” from one world to the other. They are certainly not part of some kind of “multiverse” (a term I find progressively less and less interesting as more and more intellectual properties adopt it).

But I liked this idea that there was some tenuous, unspecified, non-actionable connection between these different fictional realities. Those characters will never see each other’s worlds or interact directly. But there are common themes, ideas, and aesthetics that the PCs (in their capacity as both participants and audience) can enjoy, and that’s what loose canon is all about.