Phaze wrote:So what really is canon? This universe (actually could be explained by several Universes) appears to be more 'Rifts' than 'Rifts'. [...]
Officially, there is only one
Robotech universe and continuity made up of:
- The 1985 Robotech television series
- The Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie/OVA
- The post-2001 comics published under DC/Wildstorm
- From the Stars
- Love and War
- Invasion/Mars Base One
- Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles
- Robotech: Love Live Alive (possibly)
Harmony Gold's official position on the Invasion and Battlecry video games is that they are not canon, but elements that appear in them are.Y'see... the
Robotech franchise did not come into being with any coherent creative intent, it was made quickly and cheaply as a toy commercial for Revell's ROBOTECH toy line, a failed attempt to carve for itself a piece of the
Transformers profits. After Harmony Gold's attempts to capitalize on the show failed when
Robotech: the Movie crashed and burned and
Robotech II: the Sentinels fell apart shortly after its production process began, they basically just farmed the license out to anybody who was willing to pay. As the natural consequence of that decision,
Robotech in the late 80's and 90's became a melange of poor quality, internally and mutually contradictory versions of itself with no orchestrating intent to speak of. The licenses changed hands a fair few times, sales weren't that great on average, and it was just a real mess.
Once Harmony Gold and Carl Macek bet everything on
Robotech 3000 and lost HARD, Harmony Gold put the new creative director (Tommy Yune) in charge and tasked him with rebooting
Robotech's continuity and straightening this mess out into something resembling a credible SF/mecha anime franchise. Naturally, a step in that process was the imposition of an official canon... which I described above.
There's a lot of resentment and ill will directed at Tommy for the decision to impose a canon, since Harmony Gold's quick-fix approach to straightening out the mess of the 80's and 90's was to simply can everything its licensees had made during that period. The official reason they gave for exiling the pre-2001 comics, novels, and so on not just from the continuity, but from the franchise itself was their poor quality, inconsistencies in content, and a lack of creative oversight from Harmony Gold.* Pretty much everything except the series and the post-reboot material was summarily declared to be "not real
Robotech" and ignored thereafter. The official timeline, mecha stats, and so on proved to be equally contentious, since Harmony Gold borrowed the bulk of them from the original Japanese source material instead of coming up with their own.
Basically, there's a LOT of sour grapes over the whole thing, with some old-timers flat-out refusing to accept the imposition of an "official line" for various reasons.
* I'd imagine the rampant copyright violations in the old comics probably had something to do with that as well... but Harmony Gold didn't want to draw attention to it.Phaze wrote:So when I play do I pick a particular 'Canon' and run with it or would running a game at a con with my own 'canon' made up of pieces of all of the variations end up angering those tied to a particular 'canon'? [...]
Honestly, since the RPG is not canon anyway it's not really an issue... the goal, after all, is simply to be a big toy box for those wishing to make their own
Robotech stories. Whether you play it straight to official canon, or go with one or more of the disowned variations, depends on the preferences of your players. My group likes to stick close to canon, and some groups like to be out in left field. Whatever your players have fun with, that's the only thing that really matters for your game.