Does Authenticity Matter In Narrative Play?
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Narrative Playbook is a regular column written by Martin from Narrative Labs, taking a look at the many and varied aspects of narrative play in the many worlds of Warhammer. This week Martin looks at how we can construct our own narratives within established settings - without breaking the lore! Check out Narrative Labs on Twitch, Twitter and Facebook for the latest streaming times, and for some fantastic interactive narrative gaming.
Great news everyone! Warhammer 40,000 is returning to Narrative Labs! The Crusade launches on 17th June (that's today!), and right now you can watch a special Narrative Focus Show from 10th June where we talked about the lore, the factions and why they’re fighting. Why (apart from shameless self-promotion) am I mentioning this? It’s because as part of the preparation for this campaign our group came across an interesting challenge that I thought was worth discussing.
This isn’t a unique challenge to Warhammer 40,000 gaming, I should add. The same challenge can come up in any narrative you want to create in an established universe, including Age of Sigmar.
It all came down to a question about authenticity.
Within Narrative Labs we like to think our stories really take place within the universes we battle in. We want the audience to feel like the stories are a genuine part of the lore rather than an alternative story that takes the universe off in a different direction to the established canon.
One of our players had a really cool story they wanted to tell. It really is a great piece of writing, pulling together some loosely sketched bits of the official canon and tying them together into something with a huge amount of narrative potential. The problem was that tying those bits of canon together was, to be mild, 'stretching' the lore, if not outright breaking it. It took a lesser known character whose location and place within the lore is defined and 'shifted' it. I won’t spoil the entire story here – check out our Narrative Focus Show if you'd like to hear it.
Initially, on discussing this story I put up a firmer wall than I should have done. I had an immediate knee-jerk reaction. Clearly this isn’t what actually happened. We’re messing with the established lore of a space marine chapter and a character whose place in the lore is firmly documented. That’s taking things too far and we can’t do it (yes, I am an idiot!).
While we reached an agreement on the approach we’d take after the first round of discussions, it felt a bit off to me, because I wasn’t letting the players do what they wanted to do. As a Games Master this is never really a good place to be – it risks you losing players or at the very least, not allowing them to have as much fun as they’d like to, and if that’s the outcome then what’s the point?
One of the reasons I love narrative gaming is because of the great flexibility it gives you when playing games, taking you beyond the sometimes rigid constraints of matched play. It’s something I’m a huge advocate of, yet here I was being a gatekeeper to someone else’s creative storytelling. I’d made a terrible mistake. However, we learn a lot from our mistakes.
Realising that the issue was about authenticity I posed the question on a Warhammer 40,000 narrative Facebook group and ran a poll on Twitter to see what the reaction would be. How would they feel about watching a campaign that clearly wasn’t 'true' 40k lore? While I thought a lot of people wouldn’t mind, I felt sure there were some die-hard lore-masters out there who would have an issue with it. Given that I’d seen other shows go off into such unsanctioned territory and then have to reverse that move, I was confident my decision would be vindicated (see idiot comment above).
Readers may not be surprised to discover that I was quite wrong. The responses were overwhelmingly about focusing on telling a cool story. The 40k universe is a big place; lots of things can happen. Does it really matter if what you’re doing is an alternative timeline? If all else fails 'the warp did it' (or a wizard if you’re playing Age of Sigmar).
Combine those responses with a good night’s sleep (something you should never underestimate the power of in helping creative thought) and I realised that the place I’d left things in just wasn’t good enough. I’ve already mentioned a couple of viable approaches as to how to handle this type of thing, but let’s explore them a bit before unveiling the solution we came up with.
One thing you can do is draw a firm line in the sand and say that the lore of the universe you’re creating your story in cannot be broken. The sandboxes that Games Workshop have created for our games are vast with almost endless opportunities but there are some things that are established - bedrocks of the lore and cannot be messed with. Sometimes this is fine, but as already noted above you might lose players if you take this approach and stifle creativity. You can be seen as a bit of a gatekeeper, and that’s something I don’t see as a positive tag to be branded with.
The alternate timeline is always a path you can take. You decide that the story you want to tell is so cool that it’s more important than the lore, and so you create an alternative history. Maybe it’s as big as saying Ferrus Manus is still alive or maybe it’s as small as saying the minor space marine chapter catalogued as being a Salamanders successor chapter is actually forged from the gene-seed of a traitor primarch. Either way, you are accepting that your stories don’t really happen in the universe you are playing in, but that this doesn’t matter. This frees up your creativity, allowing you to take established facts and remoulding or twisting them into an amazing story that everyone can bring their own creations into. However, if your groups involve a person from the first camp - who believes that lore can’t be messed with - then you’re in danger of losing players for a different reason.
Clearly an alternative approach is required. While my Twitter poll fell heavily on the side of 'tell a cool story' there was enough of a call to say that some parts of the lore shouldn’t be altered. While we didn’t really go into specifics it made me think that some measure of control was needed.
The Warhammer 40,000 universe has a great mechanism in it for allowing all sorts of weird and crazy things to happen – the warp. Similarly, in Age of Sigmar, you have magic - including the raw magic at the edges of the realms. Using these concepts you can create just about any story you want, with the potential to be able to hit the reset button as well. Yes, your character isn’t where the lore says he is, but that’s okay because once it’s all over a freak warp rift or magical storm consumes the location you’re fighting and returns everyone to where they’re supposed to be, maybe without any memory of the events. This can be a nice compromise for where you have a mixed group of players, where some insist the lore can’t be tampered with and other are happy to mess around with it.
Another approach, which draws upon a similar concept, is the idea of creating stories that sit between individual bits of lore. Yes, the lore says that at this point in time your character was in this location, and they were somewhere else 100 years later. That doesn’t necessary mean they stayed in the original location for 100 years. All sorts of things could have happened in between, about which maybe they are sworn to secrecy (or have had their memory erased somehow). We've seen this kind of thing happen in TV series, films and novels all the time.
These are great ways of handling the issues that a potentially lore-breaking story creates if you want to retain authenticity in your stories. However, we came up with something a little different.
I’m not going to tell you that this is the solution to your problems, but it was a good solution to our problem. What we decided to do was allude to the story that had been created, but not make it explicit.
In the mind of the creator the space marine chapter they were working with was not created from the gene-seed of the primarch that official records documented. In the mind of the creator, the chapter found out the truth when they met an established character who helped them understand their true heritage and drove one specific task force within the chapter in a different direction.
However, for those viewing the story from the outside all we would state was that a task force from the chapter had encountered an ancient individual from the days of the Horus Heresy. Meeting this character caused this particular task force to call into question their lineage and, as a result, change their approach to the events and battles they subsequently fought in. It’s heavily implied this is a specific, established character and that the chapter's true progenitor is in fact a different Primarch, but it’s not explicit.
If you’re in the camp that doesn’t mind the lore being a little twisted you’re welcome to believe it really is this established character, that this chapter does have a different Primarch and a certain archmagos has been very naughty indeed (and who wouldn’t believe he’d do something like that if he could get away with it). If you prefer your lore to be fixed then it’s a different individual - one who’s lied to the task force about their lineage and caused them to deviate from the approaches adopted by the rest of the chapter. What’s important is not whether it is true, only that the members of the task force believe it to be true.
What happens afterwards is left to the imagination. Perhaps the character is a deceiver, the truth is discovered, and all is set right again (with some suitable penance). Perhaps they’re the genuine article and that truth shakes the chapter to its core. Whichever camp you live in, you can imagine an outcome that suits your particular stance, but all of that happens in the future, beyond the stories we want to tell.
That was our solution, and (certainly at the time of writing this) we’re all happy with the outcome as it allows the players to tell the story they want to tell, without creating any issues with the authenticity of the creation. I hope that this approach, or any of the others outlined above, help deal with similar situations you may come across in your narrative gaming.
What’s your view on the question of authenticity within the lore of the games you’re playing? Does it matter at all? Have you encountered any issues where the two approaches to the lore clashed and if so, how have you resolved them? Let us know in the comments below. We’d also love to hear about some of the creative stories you’ve told that maybe skirt the edges of established lore, if not drove a goliath rock truck right through it!
