“Sounds Like It’s Canon Now”: Texts and/as Truths in Transmedia Franchise Dungeons & Dragons

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as a paradigmatic example of canon formation in contemporary popular culture, amidst increasing use of the term “canon” by producers and consumers of transmedia franchise texts. This dissertation defines canon today as a transactional experience among audience, text, and meta-text, wherein audiences turn to texts seeking “truths” about a fictional storyworld. D&D exemplifies by presenting its own canon for audiences to play with, which then constrains them to replicate and perpetuate supposed truths about systems and race. Focusing on D&D’s drow, or dark elves, this dissertation maintains that game processes cannot be understood in isolation from the material text(s) and narratives conveying them: these too become systemic.

Drawing on models of narrative creation from literary theory and game studies, this work argues that D&D texts and their affordances create canon through and atop a game system of “quantified, interactive storytelling.” This application results in what this dissertation theorizes as procedural metanarratives, wherein parts of a game system are communicated as logical, organizing truths of a playable storyworld. In D&D, procedural metanarratives are reiterated across texts; chapters here focus on three distinct kinds, articulating each’s participation in canon formation. 

First, core rulebooks like The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, and The Monster Manual introduce procedural metanarratives about the quantification of race and teach audiences how to play D&D using them. Next, although D&D is commonly understood to derive from wargaming, sword-and-sorcery, and Tolkien-inspired fantasy, this dissertation argues that modules such as Queen of the Spiders (GDQ) and Out of the Abyss also draw from nineteenth-century adventure fiction, or imperial romance, to expand procedural metanarratives and render fantastic narratives of dark lands, imperial projects, and savage antagonists playable. Finally, D&D novelizations—such as by Ru Emerson, Pauli Kidd, Elaine Cunningham, and Lisa Smedman—affix procedural metanarratives by selecting and concretizing elements of the game system. 

Ultimately, this analysis reveals how the fundamental nature of canon inhibits the systemic change often attributed to it, given canon’s reliance on “truths” told by cultural producers via authorized texts and interpretations.