Hi all,

Something I've always wondered about, but never seen definitively answered (perhaps by definition an impossibility), is the relationship between the Warhammer omniverse's RPG and miniatures sides. I realize that over the years the canon's been gradually altered in both the fantasy and 40k settings, but I've never been entirely clear on the correlation between the GW miniatures series trunk games and the spun off licensed RPG material, be it defunct ops like Hogshead or Black Industries, or (now) Fantasy Flight.

Does GW consider the RPG stuff as canonical as its miniatures sourcebooks? Or completely separate, with only arbitrarily shared ancestral mythos?

I suppose I'm trying to get a sense of the longevity on the RPG side before throwing in, given that GW wasn't interested in absorbing it when it shuttered Black Industries. I don't see why it wouldn't continue on indefinitely under FFG's able care, I'm just trying to glean how supported it'll be going forward, and whether it'll grow the legs it deserves in spite of GW's (seemingly) ambivalent attitude toward the RPG side.

Thoughts?

Matt

To my knowledge, the RPG side is every bit as canonical as the Codices.

I know that the GW IP folks check everything that FFG does, but they give them slightly broader creative license in the Calixis Sector.

Famously everything is Canon as far as I am aware

which either means you can choose to use exactly what you like and don't like (as long as you are clear what you are using)

or you hate the uncertainly and contradictions

(I'm usually in the first camp)

on how long it will continue

I guess as long as it makes money GW being a buisness and all that - seems to be going well at present - lots of shiny books on the horizon.

Da Boss said:

I wholeheartedly agree. Use what you will. I'm a firm believer that all the contradictions and inconsistencies are intentional. We are talking about an empire that spans the vast majority of the galaxy, where it can take a starship a few years to completely traverse just a sector of space; or months for one that isn't dropping off and picking up cargo all the way. Every peice of information in WH40K is filtered through dozens of viewpoints, and sometimes decades of time lag. Of course there are going to be inconsistencies and miscommunication. Of course some stories are going to be blown out of proportion, while others dismissed as rumor. Hell just look at how long it took to mobilize against the Tyrannids.

Marc Gascoigne once made a comment on what is canon an what is not in 40k:

'll happily be your tree. But I'm not sure you'll hear much of a crash. I weary of this question, and I weary of typing it all in yet again, yet again.

I think the real problem for me, and I speak for no other, is that the topic as a "big question" doesn't matter. It's all as true as everything else, and all just as false/half-remembered/sort-of-true. The answer you are seeking is "Yes and no" or perhaps "Sometimes". And for me, that's the end of it.

Now, ask us some specifics, eg can Black Templars spit acid and we can answer that one, and many others. But again note thet answer may well be "sometimes" or "it varies" or "depends".

But is it all true? Yes and no. Even though some of it is plainly contradictory? Yes and no. Do we deliberately contradict, retell with differences? Yes we do. Is the newer the stuff the truer it is? Yes and no. In some cases is it true that the older stuff is the truest? Yes and no. Maybe and sometimes. Depends and it varies.

It's a decaying universe without GPS and galaxy-wide communication, where precious facts are clung to long after they have been changed out of all recognition. Read A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller, about monks toiling to hold onto facts in the aftermath of a nucelar war; that nails it for me.

Sorry, too much splurge here. Not meant to sound stroppy.

To attempt answer the initial question: What is GW's definition of canon? Perhaps we don't have one. Sometimes and maybe. Or perhaps we do and I'm not telling you.

So, there is no single canon, and it's pretty much up to you to choose from contradictory published material or make your own interpretation.

I'm with M John Harrison:-

The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them.

The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else’s metaphor, or realise someone else’s rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.

Literalisation is important to both writers and readers of commercial fantasy. The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes—their appearance of being a whole world–is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over “Tolkien’s World.”

Given this, another trajectory (reflecting, of course, another invitation to consume) immediately presents itself: the relationship between fantasy and games—medieval re-enactment societies, role-play, and computer games. Games are centred on control. “Re-enactment” is essentially revision, which is essentially reassertion of control, or domestication. (The “defusing sequels” produced by Hollywood have the same effect: as in Aliens, in which the original insuperable threat is diminished, the paranoid inscape colonised. Life with the alien is difficult, but—thanks to our nukes and our angry motherhood no longer so impossible as it seemed.)

“What would it be really like to live in the world of…?” is an inappropriate question, a category error. You understand this immediately you ask it of the inscape of, say, Samuel Beckett or Wyndham Lewis. I didn’t want it asked (and I certainly didn’t want it answered) of Viriconium, so I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-Earth—it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer. Those goods, as in Tolkien or Moorcock, Disney or Kafka, Le Guin or Wolfe, are ideological. “Viriconium” is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh).

Like all books, Viriconium is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to “make real.” You can’t read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else. And if its landscapes can’t be mapped, its threat of infinite depth (or at least infinite recessiveness) can’t be defused but must be accepted on its own terms, as a guarantee of actual adventure. Like the characters, the reader goes in without a clue. No character ever “survives” Viriconium: the best they can hope for after they have been sucked in is to be spat out whole (if changed). Recognise this procedure? It’s called life. This is one of Viriconium’s many jigsawed messages to the reader. You can’t hope to control things. Learn to love the vertigo of experience instead.

Any child can see that the map is not the ground. You cannot make a “reliable” map. A map, like a scientific theory, or consciousness itself, is no more than a dream of control. The conscious mind operates at forty or fifty bits a second, and disorder is infinitely deep. Better admit that. Better lie back and enjoy it—especially since, without the processes implied by it, no one could write (or read) books anyway. Writing is a con. Viriconium manipulates map-to-ground expectations to imply a depth that isn’t there. Tolkien does the same thing. Or do you think that Tolkien somehow manages to unload an actual landscape into your living room? If you believe that, get treatment.

--

Course, saying such about the uber-commercial games of GW is more than slightly ironic. But the sentiment is good. The Imperium is never the same place twice, and thats a good thing.

Mr. Harrison likes to hear himself talk a great deal. He also likes to weave a myth around mythology itself, as if legendry as a thing unto itself had its own mythic powers. This is one of his favorite thesis points, and basically translates into English as a form of literary literalism, which is the notion that there is no greater depth to what's there in a story but words-on-paper, nor is there subtext of any kind. He also speaks of "domesticating" the work of fiction, and in every case speaks to a genre that is inherently transcendental in nature and declares its transcendentalism as "diminishing" the "danger" and "mystique" of fictional body. In so doing, he (quite knowingly and intentionally) cheapens the intrinsic and extrinsic value of the work and simultaneously removes reader from the process of reading, along the way veering off into solipsistic pseudointellectual prolefeed. What's funny is that he's an author who decries the value of language as "noncommunicative" and attacks the principles of the genres he writes (prolifically) in.

If it means I don't have to justify Why the spaceship is built from gothic stonework and has an enormous dried fish nailed to the propeller I'm all there.

Idaan said:

That was a whole lot of words to say nothing at all

I think that was the point.

Dezmond said:

Which crack-fueled self-aggrandising material does that come from? Sorry, but it is practically nihilistic with reference to the ability to share an interpretation of a given fiction. Sort of phenomenology applied to culture for the misguided. There is no common frame of reference for exploration since there is no normative experience, but seemingly failing to get jiggy with the idea that while there is technically no normative experience--"normality" is a shared consensus.

How can he have a bibliography of collaborative fiction?

Weird.

Probably something out of context but still...

Kage

Does all this mean when I ask why the Narrator in Creatures Anathema isn't dead after visiting Orbel Quill (pg 73) my reply will be that "yes/no/maybe" the planet actually behaves as described in the core rulebook?

No. You may not relate to what the planet is described as in the notebook, because it's not really a planet, but rather a collection of words that gives you no true understanding or ability to interact with the premise. Rather, it is a linguistic construct that is predicated upon not-language.

Not.

Kage

Ce n'est pas un Gènestealer.