DE: Continuity error, reality must restart

[bjornwilde]

 Let's talk a bit about canons today. Are there any canons you thought of playing from but decided access to Milliways would break things and so decided against playing after all?

Or, as leeshajoy  pointed out, are there canons that would break Milliways or it's patrons, so you decided not to play?

Comments

[bjornwilde]

A prime example from my corner of the Bar is Peter Cline's Ex-Hero universe; I mean zombies and super hero, what could be better? I've thought of playing one of the main characters but I realized the whole challenge of the canon is very limited resources and there'd be no way a pup from there wouldn't try to raid Milliways for food, medicine, and muscle to clear out zombies. Plus, there is no economy to speak of any more, so how would he pay for anything?

Another temptation was JA Pitt's Sarah Beauhall. Norse mythology by way of Wagner (with dragons) and a kick ass lesbian blacksmith who's into both the SCA and making weapon props for movies? Sign me up! Only problem was for two to three of the books, Sarah has a hard time believing in the magic and myths. Going to a magic bar would put her on very shaky ground for this disbelief.

[camwyn]

Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter of Three Firs came to mind for me once or twice. I've considered it and then put it aside, because there really isn't anything I can think of about the Bar or interaction with it that would make her original canon any better. The first trilogy (I have yet to read the second set in which she is a less prominent character) doesn't need it.

Constable Kiseki Fuse of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade; he's from an anime in which Germany was responsible for the reconstruction of Japan after World War 2, and the whole thing is such a magnificently fucked-up tragedy that I can't even think of how to go about changing it without having to rewrite everything, forever. The Bar really couldn't do anything except make more of a mess, here. I don't even get the option of bringing in Fuse post-canon because he's still alive at the end of canon and I don't have it in me to play out the mass gefuckery of his world.

The reason I no longer play Hektor of Troy here and have never apped anyone else from my favourite version of Greek mythology ever- the Mary Renault books about Theseus- is because in that world the gods are accepted as real, magic is accepted as real, etc., but there is no direct interaction with the gods as individuals and there is just enough uncertainty about the events the people in the books see as divine power or magic that it could very well just be real things happening. There are too many gods in the Bar for it to work, and I love the setting too much to mess it up with that.

I have occasionally wanted to bring someone in from the historical part of the Fallout universe before the Great War. However, enough people here now know the Fallout universe that if any of them realized where the character had come in from, they'd speak up about it and history would wind up having to change, which, no.

[bjornwilde]

Your point about historical Fallout reminds me of why I haven't been able to bring in a furry Hank. Somehow it would get back to Charles and thus would alter the timeline somehow. = ]

[cameoflage]

I had actually wondered why you never tried to play the historical Fallout characters here! THE MORE YOU KNOW.

[camwyn]

Yeah. Much as I'd love to develop the pre-war Fallout world through RPing somebody like Roger Maxson here, there's no way anyone who recognized that universe would refrain from saying something about matters.

[leeshajoy]

What about canons that would break Milliways? Because I once had vague notions of apping a character from commodoreHUSTLE, but the characters are all such huge geeks that they would canonpuncture everyone.

[bjornwilde]

A very fair point! And in a similar vain, anyone from Libromancer or Geekomancy, not to mention The Librarians would have the same problem.

[bcgphoenix]

I actually had to dance around this a LOT with Gaeta when he was still going through canon. There are a few episodes that revolve around supply shortages in a way that Milliways could rectify very easily; usually, I fell back on Gaeta's sense of fairness ("I can't do XYZ solely to benefit myself"), monetary concerns ("I can't put an entIre civilization's bill on my tab"), or a super convenient lockout and/or Binding. However, with Galactica's demise pretty imminent, he's starting to abandon those concerns in favour of getting everyone the frak out of there, c.f. the still ongoing thread with him, Hoshi, and Roslin.

Back when I played Sylar from Heroes lo those many years ago, I also had to put a shitton of obstacles in place so he wouldn't try to kill every superpowered patron he met. It...mostly worked! That kinda falls into breaking both canon and Milliways, since the bar would be wrecked and he'd have about twenty extra superpowers.