How to Retcon without Looking Like You’re Retconning

I started The World of Fletnern when I was brand new to gaming.  In those days you pretty much either played Greyhawk or you made up your own world, and we usually made up our own worlds (except for those guys who insisted they could GM Middle Earth - that never worked).

So I had no idea what I was doing.  I had adventuring parties fighting wars in my mid to late teens without the slightest idea of why anyone would ever retreat from battle.  It was grand!  It was exciting!  It was memorable!  But it made no sense!

As I became more mature and more experienced with both running campaigns and world building, I started to question numerous ideas I had used earlier.  I didn’t want to scrap the world I’d put so much time into, but there were things I just couldn’t explain away.  So I did explain them away - I retconned.

Before I get into how I did it, I do want to set a level playing field.  Some of you might have different definitions of retconning.  The internet definition is:  to retrospectively revise an aspect of a fictional work, typically by introducing a new piece of information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.  What I mean is:  pretending you knew something back then that you just put in today.

And what was the best tool I ever had for retconning?  Secret societies.  Yep - when in doubt - blame it on the Illuminati.  Why?  Because the secret societies are really powerful, so they could influence events.  They’re really secretive, so they could do it without other people knowing what they did.  And they have motives that are never really understood, so even if it seems a bit out of character for them, it might have a deeper meaning that has not yet been discovered.

My best example is this:  The Battle at Rhum.  During the Conquering War, the city-state of Garnock (think Roman Legion) attacked the city of Rhum (think fantasy era Hamburg).  There was no reason the Latvich army of Garnock should have lost, but they did.  In reality, they did because the player characters were on the side of Rhum and they were throwing fireballs and fighting “level 0” soldiers, and things like that - stupid rules that allowed a tiny number of PCs to decimate huge numbers of soldiers.

So now that I’m older and wiser, I needed to explain all of that away.  I don’t play that game anymore, so I no longer need to worry about those same stupid rules, no matter what version they happen to be on.  And here’s how I did it.  First, the mundane - The Latvich army really had been split into four.  One quarter remained at home guarding their home city; one quarter had taken the city of Nanerette, one quarter was occupying the recently taken city of Parnania, and only the remaining quarter was at Rhum.

The army of Rhum was made up mainly of ex-adventurers.  This has always been part of their history.  So these ex-adventurers were far better guerrilla fighters than the legionaries.  I like to equate it to the American minute men firing Kentucky long rifles from sniper posts and picking off officers instead of standing in long lines and musketing away at each other.  Plus, there were supposed to have been allies there that I never really accounted for when I was a kid, so numbers could be jacked up reasonably.

But what I really think makes the difference is having one of the secret societies upset that one of their rivals was profiting off the war machine built by the Lats.  Now, even just the hint of a secret society being involved can give question to what people thought they knew.  What did they do, this secret society?

Well, honestly, I wanted to credit them for poisoning the Lat officers, either giving them dysentery or poisoning them to look like they had dysentery.  Admittedly, this came during a discussion of whether the French knights really lost to English longbowmen, or whether dysentery was the real issue that brought down armies.  The fact that the Lats had been in the field for months made it entirely possible.  Did a secret society get involved or was it natural?  The world may never know.

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