The Book of Masks Homepage

Non-Canonicity

Those of you who visit the forums have probably seen the thread about the seventh spell in the Libra (and the debates about what to even call the Libra), and might have detected in my own posts a prickly unhappiness with the state of canon in BoM.

I do think that I (and everyone else -- thank you all!) have done a pretty good job of keeping this gigantic hulk reasonably consistent over the decade. But enough gunk has crept into it that I've finally decided to give it a bit of a scrub.

This is not going to be a short job, and it's not going to be a very thorough job either. Shoring up BoM is going to be a bit like painting a suspension bridge. You start at one end and you keep going until you reach other end, by which point it's time to start over again. It's going to be done a little bit at a time.

I've already made a start with some chapters, going through and fixing some of the lore (and polishing it up in places) and this will be a long, slow job -- maybe at the rate of four or five chapters a day -- whose results I hope will be largely invisible.

The big changes will be in the branches that I saw off.

Yes. I am going to get rid of some chapters and storylines. Some are ones that are too hopelessly out of step with the current lore to be salvaged, while others will be branches that I am just unhappy with and wish weren't there. Branches that trailed off into nothingness, or just didn't work out. Branches that embarrass me when I find them.

I don't want to get rid of them completely, because I understand that some people might still enjoy them. So although they are disappearing from this, the "authentic" interactive, I am preserving them in a new interactive: "The Non-Canonical Book of Masks" . It will include not only the branches that I cut off, but also the chapters that lead up to those branches, so that the complete storylines will still be available and in their original forms. And here in the authentic interactive, I will edit in a link at the cut-off point, so that readers can find their way to the de-canonized branches.

For instance, if you go to "Braydon's Big Distraction" , you will find that it now includes a link to "Hijacking Gillian"  in NCBoM so that you can continue the story that was originally published. The choice "Turn Gillian into a golem" meanwhile has been restored to an unwritten state so that it can be continued in a way that is (maybe this time) an improvement on what had been there before.

My plan is only to remove branches that I'm unhappy with. I do know that there are other authors who are unhappy with some of the stuff they've written, and they are free to move some of their chapters to NCBoM. (Or to ask me to move them.) I might also ask some of those authors for permission to move some of their branches, but if so it will be for lore/continuity reasons, not because of quality.

Also, NCBoM will open and available for people to post chapters in. Just be aware that I won't be reading it, nor will I be publishing anything there -- unless I publish it in BoM and subsequently decide to move it.

I hope this will be a reasonable compromise between preserving some possibly beloved warts, and cleaning the place up a bit.