Canon and Conformity

by Andrew Gronosky

The article on canon somewhat understates the importance of canon. One of the great things about Ars Magica is the incredible richness of the Mythic Europe setting and the Order of Hermes. The established canon has grown and evolved through dozens of products over more than twenty-five years of the game's development. Its depth and breadth far exceed what any but the most ambitious fan could create for his or her own saga. This, in my opinion, is how Atlas Games earns its living: by providing a better and richer game setting than we could design for ourselves, combined with supporting rules that are professionally designed and better playtested than we could make for ourselves.

This suggests that it is much easier for a troupe or storyguide to adopt the established canon than to create an alternate setting out of whole cloth. Players want to adopt the canon exactly because it enriches their games.

This creates a certain pressure for troupes to accept canon as the in-game reality for their sagas. Most of the time, this is a positive thing. The history of the Order is riddled with unsolved mysteries (such as the disappearance of Veia or the authenticity of the Duresca scrolls), past conflicts that could re-emerge or have after-effects in the present (such as the Betrayal of House Tytalus or the war with Damhan-Allaidh) and provides a ready framework in which a storyguide can build new plot lines, large and small. With a corpus of material as expansive as Ars Magica canon, however, there are bound to be elements that are not to everyone's liking. This is entirely a matter of taste. What seems trite or shallow to one troupe is compelling to another.

There are plenty ideas in canon that a reasonable troupe might want to change. For example, the fact that House Diedne is portrayed as a druidic tradition and was wiped out in the tenth century closes off or constrains the very interesting possibility of having living magical traditions descended from druids. If you instead want to play in a Mythic Europe where druidic-inspired magic is alive and well, you need to rewrite the history of the Schism War. Part of the reason Third Edition received so much ridicule on the Berk List was that the Third Edition line editor thought demonic corruption was a wonderful theme for a saga -- indeed, for every saga. Players, by and large, did not want to be told how to play, and resisted this idea. If you carefully read supplements from that era, such as Tribunals of Hermes: Rome, you will probably agree that not everything ever written for Ars Magica is the best of all possible ideas.

It is possible and encouraged for troupes to overrule canon and write their own history of the Order, their own Peripheral Code, Mysteries, and so on. This can be easier said than done. Ars Magica canon is highly inter-connected, which is generally a strength, but can make it difficult to unravel. To rewrite the Schism War as I suggested would heavily impact not only House Diedne, but Houses Tremere and Flambeau as well. Now imagine that one of the players in this hypothetical saga is very excited about the concept of House Tremere as portrayed in True Lineages. The Schism War was a defining event for that House. Is it possible to please both the Tremere player and the storyguide who wants friendly, thirteenth-century druid-magi? Maybe, but the possibility that fixing one problem creates another is very real. This inter-connectedness, combined with the fact that most players generally like most of the canon, creates significant inertia. It's easier to play along with canon than to customize it, and the more entrenched and expansive canon becomes, the stronger the inertia becomes. Like it or not, canon does tell us how to play, or at least sets expectations in everyone's minds about how we should play.

How strongly you feel the pressure to conform with canon depends on your troupe and your style of play. The more informed the players are about Ars Magica canon, and the more you tend toward troupe style play, the more likely it becomes that one of the storyguides will want to build some of that canon into one of his or her stories. If the storyguide is the only person running stories and the only player really conversant with or invested in the canon, he or she can make unilateral changes as desired and the players may not even notice. If, on the other hand, the players are all Ars Magica die-hards with "several feet of books on their shelves", it's quite likely one or more of the storyguide will weave elements of the canon into the plot of a story. If that element happens to contradict the preferences or plans of one of the other players, then canon has created a bit of a continuity problem for your saga. If you happened to have a thriving Fourth Edition saga when Fifth Edition rebooted the canon, then you had that problem multiplied tenfold.

I think canon does more than establish a common reference for how to discuss the game. I think that, rightly or wrongly, canon sets implicit expectations on how to play. Perhaps this is why, almost ten years into Fifth Edition's lifetime, there are still members of the fan community who object to the break in continuity between Fourth and Fifth Editions and refuse to accept it.

That resistance just goes to underscore that no one really wants to be told how to play the game. There is considerable tension between the benefits that canon provides -- in enriching the game world and in providing abundant plot hook -- and the implicit constraints it places on your stories and your play style. My advice is to recognize that tension and to talk about it with the troupe; at the start of the saga, certainly, but also occasionally as your saga unfolds. If there is something in canon that you think is really in the way of your own ideas or that you think could be done better, mention it. It is probably a good idea to keep notes on how you want your saga to diverge from canon and to make those available to all the players and storyguides.

Responses

There is a discussion thread for this article on the official forum.

Feel free to add your own response here. If you prefer, you can create a new page and link to it from here.

Please do not edit someone else's response, though you are welcome to respond to it in turn.