User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/The Old Republic, fanon, and you/@comment-20644-20120317012739

I was talking to SavageOpress1138 on IRC earlier today about my idea for a TOR-based FanonProject experiment, and we came up with a few ideas that I wanted to run by everyone. Please note my use of the word experiment, because this will be playing fast and loose with the FanonProject guidelines a bit to see if we can come up with a better way of running and promoting FanonProjects for the future when the community begins to grow again.

Here’s what we talked about so far:


 * Even if you don’t play TOR, that will be perfectly fine and you should still feel free to join. One of the nice things about TOR is that, unlike KOTOR, The Clone Wars, or the films, TOR really isn’t a story about a great destiny of someone who could become either a savior or conquerer. You play as a Republic trooper, a Jedi Consular, a Sith, an Imperial, a bounty hunter, and more. Some of the classes, like Jedi Knight, make you a bit more important, but overall you’re basically one person out of an untold number of sentients in the galaxy. That limits of the scope of your story in TOR; instead of defeating the Dark Lord of the Sith and destroying a superweapon like Darth Revan, you may find yourself as a Jedi Consular going around the galaxy curing Jedi Masters who have been infected with a dark sided illness. What this means for someone who doesn’t play TOR but still wants to join this FanonProject is that you don’t have to worry about your knowledge, or lack thereof, of the major galactic events surrounding the and the . Plus, when in doubt, there’s always Wookieepedia and The Old Republic Wiki. TOR information is very well documented.
 * Unlike previous attempts at FanonProjects which have been exclusively collaborative storytelling projects, the TOR FanonProject will be both collaboratively- and independently-minded. The 100% collaboration aspect hasn’t really worked with FanonProject, because you need a community that wants to work together for that and we don't, so I’m interested in seeing one where we all work on a specific topic, even if we’re not all directly connected to each other’s stories. That way, we can all write fanon at our own pace, but still do it in a collaborative environment where feedback would be of paramount importance. That said, I would still like to see people collaborating. I basically want to see how a FanonProject would work if we said “here’s the topic, go nuts however you want!”
 * Savage posed the question of “So, theoretically, I create a character, can other users include that character in their pages? (With permission, or without permission?)” Here’s my thinking on that. I think it would be interesting if we said people could reference it, even if it wasn’t full blown default usage permissions (but usage permission could be granted). Basically, its use would be allowed in a limited scope, and with conditions.
 * In terms of whether the project would be canon friendly, i.e. following canon and not set up to exist in an alternate universe, I would like it to be canon-friendly. That way, everyone’s stories could co-exist even if they don’t directly reference/interact with one another. We wouldn’t want to contradict non-gameplay TOR information, i.e. things that you as the player cannot control or dictate. I wouldn’t say you couldn’t reference other fanon or fan fiction that you’ve created, though, but I would recommend that it be as canon-friendly as possible. If you write AU and you want to reference something, try to make it as vague as possible so it could theoretically exist in the canon universe.
 * The scope of what happens in the era in our stories would be limited, much like the game. We wouldn’t be writing about saviors or conquerers, we’d be writing about people more closer to the ground; regular Republic and Imperial troopers, common Jedi Knights and Sith Lords, smugglers and bounty hunters, etc. We’re not aiming to create the next Revan or Darth Vader here, just regular characters caught up in the events of their wartime lives.

So that’s what we talked about, and that’s what we have so far. I’m really looking forward to starting this, and I’m happy to hear anyone’s thoughts and opinions about what we have and how we should move forward.