4 weeks to DunDraCon

In just 29 days, I will be in beautiful San Ramon, staying at the lovely San Ramon Marriot hotel and running 2 games for the attendees at DunDraCon. Yes, I said 2 games. Not only am I running "The Magic Belt of Oz" to promote the RPG, but I'm running another adventure entitled "Transformers: Attack of the Retcons." This will be using the Cartoon Action Hour system, designed by Cynthia Celeste Miller and Eddy Webb. I ran this adventure at last year's DunDraCon, but I feel that I could have done it better. It was designed as a strong homage to the 1986 film Transformers: The Movie, complete with final showdown in the depths of Unicron (or his head, anyway)

For those not familiar, "retcon" is a fan term for "retroactive continuity", which is what happens when a story changes previously established lore for a character or setting. Considering that the Transformers universe is full of other "cons", such as Decepticons, Contructicons and Minicons, it seemed that including Retcons would be a fun joke. That adventure is a lot of fun to run, which is another reason that I wanted to run it again this year.

Here are a few examples of retcons from the Oz stories.

Ozian Immortality: While "Wonderful Wizard" contains a good bit of death and describes the Wizard as aging to an old man during his seclusion in the palace, later stories establish that the people of Oz never age and cannot be killed. While some Oz fans have made attempts to explain this away (the most popular theory being that immortality is only in effect during the reign of a true Fairy, as opposed to a Wizard or a Scarecrow), it is actually more of a retcon.

The Wizard and Ozma: While "The Land of Oz" describes the Wizard as complicit in Ozma's disappearance, this detail is omitted in "Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz" when the Wizard returns to Oz and he tells his version of the backstory.

I'm sure the Oz scholars among my readers can come up with a few more.