Anti-canon is a response to the Tolkien style of worldbuilding typically emphasized in fantasy fiction. It is a rejection of the creation of a world with a complete history, rigid geography, and rigid boundaries. Anti-canon instead sets out to create a world which changes as stories are told in it. While the world is consistent for each story told in it, each new story set in the world is altered in some way while carrying references or motifs to the other stories. The best example of this is M. John Harrison’s Viriconium (which the name of this blog references). An anti-canon setting for a roleplaying book would seek to provide GMs running it with a toolbox to capture the aesthetic, themes, and motifs of the world without saddling them with a rigorous canon. Unlike a traditional setting there is no one true history or geography but a world resulting from the combination of the text and the GM’s imagination.
I think this idea is fucking awesome. As someone who spends a lot of time lurking on OSR blogs, I encounter a lot of ideas spread across the internet which I pull into my games and alter to suit my own needs and preferences. I believe these games to be first and foremost games of imagination, and casting aside rigorous settings delivered from on high facilitates this. Therefore, I want to consider two primary examples of how this has been accomplished by other designers: Logan Knight’s In Cörpathium and Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands.
In Cörpathium is a blog post by Logan Knight detailing rules for generating and regenerating the macabre and titular city of Cörpathium. The city is split into distinct burroughs, each with a description, set of conditional changes, and a table of variances determined randomly. One thing I like about this approach is that as it contains a limited amount of variations the various parts of the setting will recur between iterations in a way which very intentionally mimics the motifs in Viriconium. Also notable are the conditional blocks, where parts of the city depend on the generated state of other parts. One example is that the controlling factions of the city depend on what boroughs are generated. I like this because it explicitly connects the elements while also providing even more new and different configurations for anyone experiencing the city again and again. I do think this technique should be used sparingly, though, as the number of possible combinations can quickly get out of hand. As mentioned, some things in the city are also constant, which provides a throughline and allows the city to always feel like itself.
Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) is a setting book and roleplaying game by Luka Rejec, who coined the phrase anti-canon as near as I can tell. It features a brilliant caravan-crawl game structure across a psychedelic dying earth. While I love a lot of things in this book, its approach to anti-canon disappointed me. Luka’s approach was to never outright state the canon of the world, but to include it anyways through references throughout the text. This does accomplish his stated goal of allowing the GM to fill in the blanks, but my personal experience with this was mostly annoyance as I felt forced to re-assemble the puzzle rather than inspired to invent my own pieces. I think the main issue was utilizing vagueness rather than contradiction. Rather than presenting multiple pieces of information which cannot co-exist and forcing the GM to choose between them or syncretise them, he perhaps broke an existing canon down into snippets he thought the whole could not be restored from. I find this very odd, as the blog post where Luka coins the term anti-canon explicitly calls out contradiction as a tool to establish it. It may also be the case that Luka’s blog post simply changed my expectations of the role anti-canon would play in UVG, as I read it before purchasing my copy.
When looking at these two examples, it becomes clear that there is an underlying tradeoff when writing anti-canon material between detail and waste. At one extreme one can create detailed write-ups of every possibility, exuding a lot of effort on things which will be untrue for a given instance of the setting. On the other, wasted content can be avoided at the cost of not making the canon diverge very much from instance to instance.
It is also important to recognize when to utilize anti-canon in the first place. Doing this for your own home game isn’t very useful unless you plan on running the same content again and again between multiple one-shots or campaigns. You could keep regenerating parts of the world when they leave the player’s perception, but I feel like this would get old very fast and should be done sparingly if at all. On the other hand, if writing for an audience in a blog post or published setting, anti-canon can be used to create a variety of experiences in the audience and emphasize each group’s individual experiences while still leaving common touch-stones. Any unused content will be used with enough time or with enough people generating new iterations.
My best attempt to compromise between detail and waste would be to keep all of the content in the world, but changing its status and relationships between iterations. An example of this would be having discrete regions which are placed randomly on a map, then connected by the GM based on proximity. I have considered having players roll pre-detailed homelands, but then have them decide their homeland’s locations on the world map. I think that embracing contradiction in space and time rather than in fact is a good technique, as it allows detailed content which can be reused and forces the GM to invent their own connective tissue.
Take for example a method of generating a region’s factions. Each faction is assigned a status in the world which defines their level of power and relationship with society:
- Embedded: The faction is strongly woven into the fabric of society and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. They are at the height of their power, and represent the norms and beliefs of the region’s populace.
- Marginal: The faction is at the edge of society, whether pushed there or by choice. It may be considered uncomfortable, or is perhaps simply unknown by the majority.
- Ascendent: The faction is rising to prominence and is set to become a major player in the region. It may be conflicting with or embraced by established factions as its power increases.
- Decaying: The faction still holds significant power in the region, but its days are numbered. It may have strayed from its original vision and lost direction, or perhaps it simply did not change with the world around it.
- Nascent: The faction is very young, perhaps only a small band of dedicated believers. They have little power but grand visions of the future.
- Ruined: The faction is nothing more than history, ruins, and perhaps a few bitter old folks. Whatever power they attained is gone, their accomplishments left behind and possibly forgotten.
If six factions were devised for a region, then each could be assigned a status. What would actually need to be detailed for each faction would vary, but a ladder of different power levels for a faction would provide their current capabilities as well as future developments as their power changes. The nascent and ruined statuses would likely waste the most content as such factions are unlikely to use all of the NPCs and locations which might be detailed for a more powerful faction, but if there’s too much content it also allows GMs to add to the amount of variation by picking and choosing as they wish. This method already provides 720 combinations before considering how the factions would connect.
Here’s a lightly detailed example write-up for a faction generated using random words as an oracle. My generator spat out “digress fist”, so I’m going to interpret that as a band of wandering martial monks. Another round for more detail gets me “period height”. Period makes me think of a particular time and place, and combined with height it makes me think of some kind of golden age, which I will also interpret somewhat literally. Let’s call them the Golden Order.
The Golden Order is a band of crusading monks who believe in restoring a mythical golden age to the region. They believe in personal strength and religious devotion to gold and commerce. They believe the spread of their faith will restore this supposedly glorious past.
Embedded: The elders of the Golden Order rule the region from a monastery in its capital city. Merchants and the physically strong are seen as ideal citizens of the monastery-dotted region. The order’s gold-based faith is held by the general public, though actual membership in the order is considered a high honor. The order continues to push its ideals, believing their golden age to be right around the corner as soon as they take care of the remaining dissenting voices. They lead crusades to other regions in attempts to spread their ideas.
Marginal: The Golden Order has a few small monasteries in the countryside. They are considered a fringe religious group by most of the region’s citizens, and are regarded with suspicion. The order believes it will soon be their duty to launch a great crusade, though the details and timing are vague. Some interpret this literally and spend their time perfecting a form of spirit-empowered martial combat while others believe it to be a battle of ideologies and seek to spread their faith.
Ascendent: The Golden Order has monasteries in most major towns. Their faith and ideology is growing in popularity, and they believe the eve of their crusade is forthcoming. Those not holding their beliefs fear the violence this implies.
Decaying: The Golden Order has monasteries in every town across the region. Their order is closed to outsiders unless they can pass grueling tests of physical and spiritual fitness. Members speak of a crusade, but it seems to be long-off and they are more concerned with spiritual introspection and physical self-discipline. They are well-respected by society, but many chafe under the amount of privileges the monks are afforded in society.
Nascent: The Golden Order is a small band of traveling monks and merchants which travel from town to town carrying their golden altar and holding demonstrations of their martial regimens. They stir up talk of the region’s supposedly glorious past, and sometimes pick up a few believers as they go. People generally don’t know much about them, and regard them with curiosity and derision in equal measure.
Ruined: The Golden Order once held considerable sway in this land, and the ruins of their monasteries still dot it. They are believed to have worshiped gold itself, attracting treasure hunters to the region. Their downfall came about when they embarked upon a crusade against the spirit world which ended in ruin for them and the region.
If I were developing this further, I would describe their beliefs and abilities in greater detail while leaving their crusade vague. I would also do a full map of one of their monasteries, which could be used at their prime or as a ruin.
Leave a Reply