DEFINING CANON IN AN ALIEN WORLD

As a franchise consultant to 20th Century Fox on ALIEN, Predator, and Planet of the Apes, I often had to take a long hard look at a number of long-beloved franchise stories and try to figure out how exactly that could still fit in canon. If I couldn’t, I had to recommend they be tossed. I proposed a third option–what I’ve come to call barroom canon. These are stories overheard in a bar (or read in a comic, or played in a video game, or even posted on Facebook) that may or may not have some truth to them. This allows canon to have some flex in regards to including stories that otherwise could no longer count in a franchise’s development.

As the lead writer and canon consultant on the ALIEN RPG by Free League Publishing, I developed the following Canon Tier guidelines to working out the ALIEN universe.