How consistent the game world?

While staying with friends for a long weekend out of town, I had a planned visit from a girlfriend from many years ago who lived in that area who I had not seen in forever. Back in the day she played in my games a lot, and since the girlfriend of the pal I was staying with requested I run a D&D game I had asked my old friend to come and play with us. What was especially interesting is that my friend from back in the day now owned a game store in Northern Cali. So I came up with some encounters we could do in a fairly short session.

What I went with was the area around good ol’ Tegel Manor. Though the last couple of years I used a sort of prequel setting for the location, I went with full on classic haunted Tegel. There only ended up a couple of combat encounters on the roads and in the village, so the actual manor never got visited (hopefully we can finish that up some day), but in thinking about the setting, I was struck by how consistent I needed to be with it. See, in my game world maybe 30 years have gone by since any characters went to Tegel. A decent chunk of it had been mapped by a couple of parties over the early years, and many of the various NPC’s interacted with. So, would I still have Runic Rump the paladin around looking to sell the manor? Would the lich still be in the tower (though characters had routed him out decades before); would the black pudding still be in the outhouse? Should I change things to show the place had been looted before, and that all this time had passed?

See, I’ve used the same game world I created for D&D since I was a kid. The same world where over time I had adventures using many classic modules. Tegel, The Giants adventures, The Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, Homlet. In my mind, I always thought towards keeping a certain amount of constancy. If the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief had been taken down, would a replica of it every pop up many years down the line for a different group?

Recently I have lost that desire to maintain that consistency. And why not? Over time, as my game groups come and go, I’m the only one aware of any true passage of time in the game world reality. Have I tried to maintain a certain consistency just so that, in my own mind, this can seem like a real place? That’s pretty daft.

I want to use lots of my favorite old adventures, such as Tegel, when I get back on D&D with my group. To hell with all the consistency. I’m not writing novels based on it, and I’m not maintaining internal integrity of the game world because I’m keeping meticulous journals on it over the many years. Hell, the notebooks with my notes on those old sessions are long tossed away.

My old comic collecting background is helpful for that. If you love a universe, such as Marvel, you have to accept a certain amount of retconning. Tony Stark originally had his origins as Iron Man in the Korean Conflict. Then Vietnam. Then The Gulf War. Ben Grimm was a WW2 veteran. Now I don’t think he is the vet of any war. These things are fairly minor, and the universe moves forward.

But I’m wondering how much other DM’s with long time game worlds of their own have done to maintain internal consistency of the game world. Would they go so far as to refrain from ever using the same module, as is, a second time even if it is for different players? Or is that just some weird conceit unique to me?

Avengers Assemble!

This promo poster art for next year's Avengers film is our first real indication of what the heroes involved will look like together. Interesting to note (to me anyway) how out of place the dude from Hurt Locker looks as a maskless Hawkeye the Archer. We have to keep in mind this is the Ultimates version of The Avengers (although that Hawkeye wore special glasses because they strangly had him be near sighted in that version).

Time will tell, but right now it seems unreal that I am actually going to get such a huge Marvel team-up in a live action film in my lifetime, and that it might actually not suck (it could be stupid, but it will be fun for sure). Now, where the hell is my Justice League film, true believers?