Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 258 - Canon

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Whether you make up your own canon or use the lore pregenerated by someone else, there are challenges to maintaining the canon and lore for your world.  In this episode I discuss some tips and tricks I’ve learned through the years to help keep it all straight.   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #lore #canon Resources: Buy Me a Coffee! - ko-fi.com/taking20podcast Episode 224 - Lore Part 1 - https://www.taking20podcast.com/e/ep-224-lore-part-1/  Episode 225 - Lore Part 2 - https://www.taking20podcast.com/e/ep-225-lore-part-2/  Episode 114 - The Cataclysm of Krynn - https://www.taking20podcast.com/e/ep-113-the-cataclysm-of-krynn/  DnD Shorts - The Original Rules for Women in D&D are Wild - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSvCP401kK0    Million Podcasts Award - https://www.millionpodcasts.com/dungeon-master-podcasts/    RJD20 - Canon, Your Homegrown Setting and You - https://www.rjd20.com/2021/06/canon-your-homegrown-setting-and-you.html  

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Similarly, if you don't need a piece of lore, canon, history, whatever, then don't worry about it. Kick that can down the road and only pick it up if you absolutely need to. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 258, giving DMs some tips for handling game world canon, both their own and others. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Doorknobs. It's important that the doorknob be used properly to open the door.

After all, everyone should have a turn. First off, I want to thank a couple of listeners who generously donated to the podcast. Robert Norez and Laura both generously donated to the podcast on my ko-fi page. Thank you both from the bottom of my cold dead heart. It's donations like yours that keep this podcast going. If you'd like to help support the podcast as well please head over to my ko-fi page ko-fi.com slash Taking 20 podcast. I'll include a link in the description of the episode. I don't put episodes behind a paywall since I'm doing this more as a hobby than anything

else, so if you'd like to donate like Laura and Robert did, I would love to receive some money to offset the operating costs, but if you can't donate right now, no problem. I'm just thankful you're listening. My apologies for the needed break. My mother was having some medical procedures done and I needed to be there to support her. She's getting up there in age and it's nearing time where the roles of caregiver and care receiver will flip from when I was a kid. No complaints by the way, it's part of the cycle of life. I did need the time away though from writing and recording to focus on her, so thank you so much for your patience with me while I was away. I probably won't take another break, God willing, till the holiday season at the end of the year. Also, thank you to listener Mark who let me know my website

was down. My hosting provider migrated without my knowledge and the new one took a giant dump on my DNS record and website certificate and a bunch of other stuff, making the redirects not work properly. My apologies if you went to my website in the past few weeks, it should be up again. One last announcement. A site called millionpodcast.com added my podcast as number nine in the top 100 Dungeon Master podcasts. Thank you to Mr. Agarwal for reaching out to me about my nomination and award, and I'll put a link to the awards page in the podcast description. With the break, I had a long time to think about this week's topic, lore and canon. Giving me a long time to think is probably a bad idea because I haven't learned my lesson

from past episodes. Thanks to this extra time, I want to talk to you about two different types of canon this week. My original thought was to talk about the kind of lore and canon that you generate. But conversations with my DM friends over the past few weeks indicated that I think I can pass on some hard-earned lessons about pre-generated lore as well, so this is going to be an extra long episode. My apologies in advance. Let's level set about canon. Canon refers to the material that is officially accepted as part of

a game's universe, history, and lore. As one friend put it to me this week, effectively, canon is established truth in the world. How this nation or company or family came to be, what it's like now, who did what to whom for how many cookies, and what happened to both of them for it. I had a two-part episode on lore way back in episodes 224 and 225. In those episodes I suggested you sprinkle lore around only as much as you need to and reveal it using multiple methods like art, items, environment, and other methods. I'll put a link to those episodes in the description, but the focus there was how to reveal the lore to the players. This is going to focus on managing the lore of your world.

As an aside, to my beloved listeners out there, I'm not going to deep dive on any established canon. That is not what this episode is about, and I don't have the time. But I will likely mention something like the Harpers, or The Red Wizards, or Absalom, or Red Mantis Assassins, The Cataclysm, The Ghost Field, or any number of other topics that easily could be a lore episode all its own. If you are interested in an episode about a particular lore topic, by the way, send it to me on social media or email feedback at taking20podcast.com. I love exploring established lore, and I've already done episodes

on the Cataclysm, Strahd, Earthfall, the Orcgate Wars, Eridan, and the vast and starfinder. For example, in the sword coast of Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep is known as the City of Splendors. It is a city of enormous population, diverse populace, and is the center of trade, knowledge, and politics for the entire region. Meanwhile, in the Pathfinder world of Galarian, part of the lore is that the Great Wizard War between Geb and Nex, they fought for so long and used such powerful magic that the area between their nations is known as the Mannawastes, where magic is said to not function properly, and creatures have become mutated

beasts leading to a land filled with horrible monstrosities that patrol looking for their next meal or worse. That's great, but what about your world's lore? The canon that would apply to the game that you're running, the histories and everything else? In my experience, if you generate your own lore, there are two big challenges the amount of work required and keeping it all straight. I just want to say out of the gate that it is nearly impossible to come up with comprehensive lore for an entire region, world, universe, multiverse or anything else. Lore is an exponentially branching tree that will leave you broken if you try to

write it all at once. So my advice, create lore as you go as it's needed just in time for use at the table. While researching for this episode one of the sources I found was a great blog post stretching back to 2021 or so by a young man named RJ over at RJD20.com. I'll put a link in the description for the episode. And by the way, how can I say that he's a young man? It's not dismissive to say that. His advice is solid and sound. It's because he states he's in his twenties and I am... not. Anyway, I learned a lot by reading his blog. He said, very succinctly, a concept that it took me two paragraphs to try to convey,

so I'm going to quote him when I give you my first big tip and method. When it comes to lore in your game world, if the player characters encounter something in the world, that becomes canon. So you generate canon based on what the PCs encounter, learn and need for your game, and then expand it when needed. The lore can stay in that state until they encounter the next piece of lore or canon that they need, which you can deliver at that time. Similarly, if you don't need a piece of lore, canon, history, whatever, then don't worry about it. Kick that can down the road and only pick it up if you absolutely need to.

Generating canon and history for your world as you need to means the lore of your game grows naturally, organically, only in the directions where it's needed based on where the PCs are going and what they're doing. That reduces the problem to a manageable level. You don't need to come up with a canon history for an entire world or continent or even a nation. Maybe you start with a city or hell a building within that city. Then later when the players move to another building or area of the city you can generate the lore you need just before they go there. It's a variant of just-in-time manufacturing where you only generate or collect what you need just before you need it. Plus, as a side benefit, imagine you came up with lore about

a corporate entity in the preparation for an adventure. It's called Adreno Soft. It started in the founder's garage, secured its first government contract three years later, supplying portable batteries for GPS receivers whatever. Three years ago it expanded into renewable energy and went international and now is a 1 billion euro corporation. Great you made all of that up but somehow during the game it never came out. The PCs never needed to know it. They completed the adventure. Okay you've done all that work. Reuse that shit. Use all the bullets.

Started in a garage. First contract. Project expansion. International. Now it's not about Adrenosoft, it's about Consortium Mondial. Which is the next major target they're going after. Don't waste those Lego pieces you've created. If they go unused, break them apart and make something else with it.

Reuse your lore where you can. Now that being said, when you generate lore as you go, you have to come to grips with the fact that lots of your world is an empty void lore-wise. Maybe you have a vague idea of the undiscovered histories, but they haven't come up yet, so you really haven't revealed them. I know a few game masters who would hate having done the work ahead of time and not given it to the players. Given the reduced stress and not having to spend the tremendous amount of effort design everything you need before you start, in my GM experience that reduced stress is a positive trade-off that I'm more than willing to make for living with the fact that some of my world is a void lore-wise.

This doesn't necessarily mean you make it up as you go at the table. I mean you can if you take really good notes, more on that in a minute. But what I mean is that you still craft the histories, the mysteries, the legends, the lore ahead of time, but it's only a session or two, a week or two, right before you need it, not months or a year ahead of time, but it's only a session or two, a week or two, right before you need it, not months or a year ahead of time. This lets you laser focus on just the lore you need when you need it and not worry about the rest of the canon for your world, which would be very high effort with very little payoff. That being said, someone out there is listening to this and they are not comfortable unless

everything is planned out ahead of time. After all, if you generate all your lore just in time, there's a chance your lore and history would become inconsistent. DMs like this need more of a structure and plan for their lore in order to be comfortable running their game world. No judgement here. If you're like one of those GMs, then the advice I would have for you is start with your loose structure, a framework, a scaffolding of your your lore and then expand on it only when you need to It's a variant of the previous advice

But only you do put a little bit of more effort ahead of time to design the rough idea So, okay. What do I mean by this? Maybe you design the rough pantheon of your gods ahead of time You know, you need a deity of wealth health health, hearth, and war. And you create the ideas for them, the placeholders for them, the need for them, and then fill in the details later when you really, really need them. After all, you know you need a god of premature ejaculation and don't have him yet, but you hear he's coming quickly. Hey!

All credit to the unparalleled genius Mel Brooks which is where I first heard that joke. With this second method you have an idea for what you need and fill it in later. You're still minimizing the amount of work ahead of time but you still only have to fill in the minor details later when you need them. Maybe you have the outline and the structure of the bones of your lore and then you put meat on the bones when you need to. I promised something about notes and here's where I want to mention the second problem when creating your own canon, keeping it all straight.

Listen, I am honest when I talk about my weaknesses and this is certainly one of them. I have a hard time keeping all the history and lore and cultures and impacts and major events straight and consistent in my game world. I have too much crap to try to keep track of outside of the game like oh I don't know minor things like birthdays and anniversaries, doctor's appointments and shit like that that I would get in real trouble for forgetting. I have too much of that to keep up with which means I struggle keeping that same level of detail in my game. If you're not like that and can keep all that lore of your world straight in your head, I am envious beyond belief. If that's you, you may not need these next two tips. Just fast

forward maybe about three minutes or so. But if you're like me, the next tip I'm going to give you is the most obvious one we could all think of. Write it down ahead of time. An invaluable skill to learn is how to write down what you need ahead of time before the game begins. I am all for improvisation hell. I'm in an improv troupe and one of the advantages of improv is not having to remember stuff outside the scene you're in. When I'm gaming and behind the screen and make up canon on the fly and write nothing down, my history and lore becomes very inconsistent with details forgotten until it's too late and I've told the PCs the wrong

piece of history or incorrect lore. There's only so many times you can say, well, the humans, yeah, they think it happened this way. And that's what I was explaining, but the elves would say something different. Yeah, that's why it's that's why it's different You're trying to correct the wrong lore the first time and it just turns ugly fast Taking a little bit of time to document your canon and lore will help your world to have a consistent history And will enrich the role-playing experience for your players. I Have only so much mental bandwidth I can allocate to any one thing at any one time and writing stuff down ahead of time when I can means that's one less thing that I

have to try to remember, and having it written gives me a consistent base for the tower of lore and history that I'm providing to the players. But Jeremy, you may be saying, some stuff I still have to make up on the fly because I never know where they're going to go, and I may have to make up some history when they unexpectedly go to this ruined temple in the middle of the forest. Okay, well first off, why are you even telling them there's a temple there if you don't have any details about it? You're the controller of the entire world. If you're not ready and don't have the lore, canon, reason, history, whatever

of a place, don't put it in your world. Second tip, have at least a basic structure of lore but only if it's important to the game. Not every building, location, hex on the map needs to have a history. If it's not important to the story there's no point in coming up with it why the bank was built here, why it's made out of slate instead of granite, and why the vault has three guards with flamethrowers on the outside and two with tasers on the inside at all times. It just does. By the way, the reason is because the outside of the vault is made of solid stone and won't catch fire, whereas the interior of the vault could have paper money and you don't want to burn that. There's a reason I just came up

with it off the fly while I was talking to you guys in a mic. That being said, if the guard situation happened because of a historical event and that event is or could be important to the game you're playing, then yes, figure it out and have it ready. Maybe they used to use flamethrowers previously and they accidentally burned the deed to the town courthouse down, which is why it's not technically owned by the city anymore. I don't know, I'm making shit up, Zekko. That could be fun or could be incredibly stupid. Since I'm making it up, I'd probably struggle to remember it once this session is over. And that brings me

to my third tip. If you need to remember the lore, canon, or general things you say in session, I like audio recording my sessions so you can play it back later and listen to it for note-taking purposes. Recording your sessions alleviates the need to write down notes as you go throughout the session. The recording will tell you who told what to whom, and it will be much easier to keep things like history and lore consistent throughout the campaign. But there is a major, major caveat to this advice. You need to get your players' approval before you start recording them. I don't record a lot of my sessions for a major reason. I have a podcast. I know if I started recording my game sessions at some point I'd be tempted to use some of those

recordings in an episode. So I don't record my players during the game. What do I do? What do what I do do? What I do is I use speech to text to record my notes as I go, muting the mic and speakers and keeping my own notes to remember what I said. Then I go back after the episode and fill in more details if I feel like they're necessary. So I take notes as I go, which is another tip that you can use whether you audio record or not. This basic structure works for me, but it might not for you. If you need to record the entire gaming session, make sure all of your players are comfortable with it. This is not a majority rule situation. Everybody has to agree and if anyone doesn't want what they say recorded, then you shouldn't do it.

Okay, let's switch gears over to dealing with canon that you don't generate. History and gods and cities and documents and everything else made for the world you're adventuring in, but you didn't make it yourself. and everything else made for the world you're adventuring in, but you didn't make it yourself. In Dungeons and Dragons, this could be the sword coast of Forgotten Realms, the world of Greyhawk, Darksun, Eberron, Exandria, Ravenloft, whatever. If you're running a game in the world of Dragonlance,

there's an intricate history told over, as of this recording, 190 books from the world shaping event of the Cataclysm, which I talked about in episode 114, down to the nature of the tavern in the small tree town of Solace. It was the inn of the last home, by the way, where the heroes met after being apart for five years. That's one major thing and a few minor things having to do with the world of Dragonlance. I didn't even mention the stealing of dragon eggs, birth of the Draconians, kinder, gully dwarves, quala nesti, the black rose knight, salamnia,

tachysus, and everything else established in that world. And this is the first problem with pre-generated canon when adopting it into your game. The sheer volume of it. It's exhausting to try to keep it all straight, even if you did write it all down. Hell, lots of it is already written down for you in wikis and webpages, but even then, trying to keep your game consistent is a huge challenge. So what do you do? Never adventure in Galarian? Never go to the Sword Coast? Never play Dragonlance? No! These pre-made worlds have existed for a long time for a reason. Using pre-made canon and lore can save you a tremendous amount of time when you're preparing to run your game.

So what you can do with pre-generated lore is to focus on what I'm going to call the now and the next. If you are running a campaign in the Dragonlance world of CRED, and it's well after the Cataclysm, the party's in the Ogrelands, focus on the lore for that part of the world. Don't worry about Kindermore or the Plains of Dust or Istar or anywhere else, because while there's extensive lore for those areas, it just doesn't matter to your game at the moment. If the time is right in the future, yeah, bone up on it and be ready to provide it to

your players when they need it. It is impossible to memorize all the lore in these worlds that authors have spent hundreds or thousands of pages describing. So in short, you have to manage what you learn and provide it to the players, doling out lore in manageable chunks. And while we're on that subject, don't do a massive exposition dump on your players and expect them to remember it all, or remember it in part, or maybe remember it at all. Less is more when it comes to providing lore and canon to your players. Focus on the important things they need, need, need to know. I can hear you. You may be asking, well, focus on what? Focus on the lore and history relevant to the adventure where the PCs are, who the major NPCs would be, any local goings on and key locations.

What canon, what lore, what history, what legends are important to know so the PCs can engage with the main plot and the big bad. Only delve deeper into lore that is directly tied to the current adventure, the player's backstories, or upcoming challenges or hints that you want to foreshadow. Okay, but that's great, Jeremy, but how do I keep it organized? When I'm adventuring in Galarian, I create a cheat sheet of important events, lore, and history that the players may need to know for this adventure. And if the lore isn't important, I chuck it.

Keeping it around isn't relevant and if anything it might just reduce the flexibility I have in how I use certain NPCs or areas. Sometimes you want to augment the pre-written lore with your own that makes for a better story for your PCs. So there's another tip. Make a cheat sheet of just the important stuff you need to know in these pre-designed game worlds. Keep this cheat sheet short, by the way. You don't need to keep a document that's 100 pages long. For example, I'm running Abomination Vaults right now, and I have about one and a half pages of lore and history in a single document that I expect to come up sometime in the campaign. Keeping this imminent lore sheet brief helps me retain the important lore

and have it at my fingertips as the adventure unfolds. I update the sheet periodically as I reveal lore and canon to the party so I can keep track of what I've told them and what is yet to be revealed. When it comes to published lore, there's a lot of topics that could make players feel uncomfortable.

For example, in the Pathfinder world of Galarian, the nation of Cheleax engages in slavery over the halflings that suffer in their midst. If during a session 0, one of your players says they are uncomfortable with slavery, then you need to remember that player's discomfort when it comes to choosing whether or not to reveal the lore or to change it. In cases like this, you can disregard or change the lore if possible to avoid topics that make players feel uncomfortable. That being said, there are times when that lore is central to the story. The adventure revolves around working with the Bellflower Network who are rescuing halflings from slavery, then you may need to talk to the player about their concerns and have the slavery maybe happen behind a veil, so it

exists in the campaign world but you don't dwell on it. This is especially true by the way of lore in some of the older games like the original D&D and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons published in books and Dragon Magazine. Not just the canon but even some of the rules of those games were problematic. While remembering a few of those old rules I started dusting off parts of my brain I haven't used in a while and did a Google search about them. And when I did, by the way, I found a great video on a YouTube channel called D&D Shorts called The Original Rules for Women in D&D are Wild. And while I remembered some of what he discussed in the video with Jenny D, I

had forgotten how awkward and controversial some of those old rules were. In the video, I like that the two intelligent content creators can talk about the old rules and discuss how times were just different back then. I'll put a link in the description of the episode because it really is worth a watch. What I remembered was that in old versions of D&D, first off, there weren't any genders besides male and female, and female characters had slightly different stats and rules. For example, female characters had a beauty score instead of a charisma score, and their maximum strength value was lower than what males could have.

Editor Jeremy here. Um, I don't want this discussion of the episode to devolve into whether the rules in old D&D games were sexist, racist, transphobic, or any other thorny labels like that. Just accept with me that the rules were different. Now the rules in most modern systems like D&D, 2024, Pathfinder 2e, etc. are more welcoming to a wider array of backgrounds, beliefs, genders, and types of characters people want to play. Hell, in the 80s, I once got some funny looks because I wanted to play a female character

in a game. But you're a guy! Since then, in various games, I've played gendered and non-binary characters, short, tall, pretty, monstrous, and I am very thankful that modern games give me that opportunity, generally without any in-game penalties for doing so. Sorry, back to the original episode. I mean beauty instead of charisma. I guess that means according to the rules, men couldn't be beautiful and women couldn't be charismatic. Women could only influence others by looking good. Thank God that's changed. And while we're on the subject, the lore and histories of the older games were overwhelmingly heterosexual

and gender normative. The existence of a homosexual couple or non-binary NPC, if they were included at all, were there primarily to highlight how those people were different and they stood out from the crowd. Rarely will they included and highlighted to help bring about acceptance. Anyway, all of this to say is that some lore, especially older lore, may have to be adjusted in the light of modern societal beliefs and would need to be discussed with your players prior to starting the game. Finally, when it comes to pre-generated lore, if there are aspects that make you or your players feel uncomfortable or don't fit with the world you're trying to build, that the

players want to adventure in, change it, discard it, get rid of it. There isn't a lore police that's going to come kick in your front door because you made the city of Procamper a city state in the elemental plane of earth instead of the vast Just because Wizards of the Coast says Drizzet Duurden was a drow who gave up the ways of his people doesn't mean that has To be true in your world make him a her or a hill giant or a human or talking plant Canon is not biblical truth and changing it does not diminish your game at all. If one of your players wants to play the

well actually Drizzit was a drow who didn't want to be evil like all the other drow you can simply say not all drow are evil in my campaign and in this world. Drizzit was a centaur and if you think you have a player who won't be able to get over that then Drizzit just became a tail-phasio with an exact same lore and history. Change what you need when you need to. There are challenges to handling game world canon. Today I gave you some of my lessons learned from crafting my own lore just in time, ensuring consistently through notes or recordings, navigating pre-existing lore by focusing on immediate relevance, and adapting older content from modern sensibilities. I hope some of these tips empower you to create richer, more cohesive, and enjoyable

gaming experiences for your players, whether you're building a world from scratch or adventuring in an established setting. If you do take some time and care with your lore, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe, and follow us on social media. I'll include links in the episode description. Come on by, say hi. In two weeks, I'm going to give you some advice about running adventures in space. Thank you for those who get that joke. And I'm also going to give you a review of the recently released second edition of the

Starfinder Player Core. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Doorknobs. If you're having problems opening your doorknob, get a grip. This has been episode 258, all about canon. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host.

References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.