PathfinderWiki talk:Canon policy

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Elevate consideration of unreliable narrators

Changes Proposed This section contains suggested changes to this policy. Please discuss the suggested changes here. For further information please see the policy revision process.

Paizo is trending toward publishing more high-tier works with significant sections written from potentially unreliable in-universe points of view. The canon policy currently assumes that this is primarily a concern with Pathfinder fiction, but this is no longer the case. See Talk:Yivali for notes on significant credibility issues related to Tier 1 Divine Mysteries.

In Tier 2, the canon handling of fiction works is qualified by the following:

when resolving conflicts between works of fiction and sourcebooks, both of which are Tier 2 sources, take into account the possibility of, for instance, an unreliable narrator in the fiction; always explain the rationale when a sourcebook is considered of greater authority than a fiction source

I propose elevating this note to become the second paragraph of the parent "Valid resources" section, and rewriting it as follows:

Treat portions of works authored as if written by a character of the Pathfinder campaign setting, such as Pathfinder fiction or sections of Pathfinder sourcebooks, as potentially unreliable sources. When judging conflicts between a potentially unreliable source from a work of a higher canon tier and an objective source from a work of equal or lower canon tier, identify the source of a disputable assertion in the body of articles or corroborate the assertion with a more objective source if one is available.

This codifies existing practice when handling unreliable narrators, such as Yivali in Tier 1 Divine Mysteries or the crew of the Zoetrope in Tier 1 Howl of the Wild, where they conflict with content from the same and other works that is written from an objective point-of-view. -Oznogon (talk) 03:45, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

As the current policies do not fit the current trends of Paizo's published works, I support this change. But I think it should be noted that the boundaries of such unreliable narration is not always clear. In Divine Mysteries, for example, there is no difference in style between Yivali's writing and clearly mechanical rules content, such as the covenants and pantheon's rules. In addition, the individual deity sections are lightly suggested to be a listing created by Yivali herself, though they are not otherwise presented from an in-universe point of view. I do not personally think it is necessary to describe Yivali as the unreliable in-universe source for every minor deity described in Divine Mysteries. It may be useful to identify which sections of a book are considered unreliable for the purposes of this wiki on a case-by-case basis, perhaps on the sourcebook Talk or Meta pages. -Ravenstone (talk) 04:34, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

That's fair. I've amended the proposal. -Oznogon (talk) 04:56, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

I approve this proposal. --Rexert (talk) 11:16, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Remove Kobold Quarterly as a canon source

Changes Proposed This section contains suggested changes to this policy. Please discuss the suggested changes here. For further information please see the policy revision process.

I propose removing Kobold Quarterly from the list of valid Tier 4 canon sources, per James Jacobs in 2021:

“

It's Golarion content, but it's not "official" Golarion content, since we didn't put it through nearly as rigorous a look-over as we did our published stuff (and at that time, we weren't doing a particularly rigorous look over for our own stuff, so in retrospect I'm pretty comfortable saying that the Kobold Quarterly stuff was 100% not official, except the parts we eventually pulled into print in our books).

”

Jacobs' statement suggests that content that appears only in KQ is intentionally omitted from Paizo-published works, and should therefore not be included in a canon encyclopedia.

Examples of affected articles include infernal dukes, details about some of which appear only in KQ #22 and were never printed in a Paizo product. For instance, only KQ 22 associates Kalma with Barbatos, and the infernal duke Làu Kiritsu detailed in an article in KQ 19 is mentioned only in passing in The Haunting of Hinojai and nowhere else that I can find. -Oznogon (talk) 22:08, 8 April 2025 (UTC)