OT-Black Company

[nordlys]

Wrana said:
Unfortunately, T$R didn't give a damn about what is canon and what is not. Which caused many contradictions between authors describing their worlds. And I don't mean fiction only - there were quite a few contradictions in their accessories!

Well, [censored] happens. Not a single "shared world"-type work of fiction is guaranteed to be contradiction-free. Hell, even single-author series occasionally slip. I remembed having a huge flame with some Tolkien fan over the issue of orcs' intelligence, as he referred to some obscure late letters where Tolkien decided orcs are some kind of mindless beings, thus assumedly "overriding" their obvious sentience of published novels.

At least TSR didn't have to retcon whole accessories as insane ravings, like White Wolf had to do with "Dirty secrets of black hand" and some other 2ed stuff, essentially "replacing" it with another accessory and erasing most traces of its lore in 3ed. I only remember them to officially rule non-canon the "Lord of the Necropolis" Ravenloft novel, dissing its revelations on Dark Powers as Azalin's hallucinations. They also removed the references to Soth from Ravenloft by the end of 2ed, and various Forgotten Realms references in 3ed, when Ravenloft was licensed to Swords&Sorcery, but that was for legal reasons, and they just changed names to generic crap like "Dark Knight" or "Morninglord".

...Not to mention that finding bugs and contradictions in such works is an entertainment in itself

I didn't mean those - just because I don't play 40K and so wasn't interested in those books. Maybe they are quite bad - I'd only read one which wasn't bad for trash literature... I believe I named authors I meant - Jack Yeovil in particular and he never written in 40K series. He was reprinted some time ago, though...

I haven't read the Genevieve novels if that's what you mean. Yeovil is a pseudonym, I saw him/her mentioned in an article by some other early GW writer I've recently read as one of those who used pseudonyms as to keep their reputation untarnished by gaming fiction

[MaxWilson]

nordlys said:
Well, [censored] happens. Not a single "shared world"-type work of fiction is guaranteed to be contradiction-free. H***, even single-author series occasionally slip.

And some (Steven Brust comes to mind) seem to insert contradictions deliberately, just to mess with readers' heads. This is the same author who, knowing that some fans like to read the Vlad series in chronological order, admits that he deliberately wrote /Dragon/ to take place both before AFTER after /Yendi/.

The fiend! [shakes fist at heavens]

-Max