Babylon 4: Canon FAQ
What is considered canon for this game?
Babylon 5 has an extended universe with books, comics, RPGs, and other materials. Some of it can be contradictory which can make it hard to keep track of what is and isn’t canon.
For this game, we are following these guidelines:
Canon:
The 5 seasons of the original Babylon 5 TV show.
The movie “In the Beginning”.
Not Canon:
The pilot: The Gathering.
The movies: Thirdspace, River of Souls, and Call to Arms.
The spin off TV shows: Legend of the Randers, Crusade, Road Home, and Lost Tales.
The novels.
The comics.
The tabletop RPGs.
Anything else.
Everything on this wiki trumps anything found anywhere else, even in the TV show.
Other websites like the Babylon 5 fan wiki and B5Scrolls should be approached with caution, they can have some really good background material but also a lot of things taken from other sources that we’re not treating as canon, and sometimes they just make things up.
What can we use from the TV show?
(If you haven’t seen the TV show, you can skip this completely)
This game is set in an alternate timeline and we will be using a lot of the setting and history leading up to the TV show, but not the events of the TV show itself. Players familiar with the TV show should not assume that anything will occur the same.
Be careful about meta-knowledge; anything that was a secret at the start of the TV show is a secret at the start of the game, and some things may not even be the same.
In particular, here is a list of TV show topics that we want to treat with caution:
Warning: This list contains spoilers for the TV show.
The First Ones
No one knows the term “First Ones”, or anything about them, or whether they exist. There are still rumours about strange things happening out on the Rim, but nothing more than rumour, no one has definitively seen anything.
The Vorlons
The Vorlons exist as one of the major governments and are simply known to be an old and mysterious species. No one knows how long they’ve had space travel (assume between a hundred and a thousand years longer than the Minbari). No one knows how advanced their technology is. No one has ever seen what they look like without their encounter suit. No one has ever been into their territory and returned.
The Shadows
No one knows anything at all. Note that the planet Alpha Omega 3 (Z’ha’dum) has not yet been discovered and the Icarus has not begun its fateful voyage and isn’t scheduled to for another 2 years, that means that Morden (if he exists at all) is just an ordinary doctor of Archaeo-lingüistics somewhere in Earth Force.
The Psi Corps
The Psi Corps is just the part of Earth Gov that polices telepaths to make sure they don’t infringe on your rights. You will also have heard of Psi Cops that enforce the laws that telepaths have to follow. You know nothing of any conspiracies they might be involved in or of experiments they may have conducted. You won’t have heard about Black Omega, or about the origins of Dust.
Valen and Minbari Prophecy
Minbari characters will know about and likely revere Valen as a spiritual leader who unified their people a thousand years ago. They will have heard sayings like “A Minbari not born of Minbari”, that he unified the Castes, and created the Rangers, but they know nothing more about his origins or what he really did beyond the common religious dogma spread by the Religious Caste. High ranking Minbari characters may have heard rumours about his prophecies but probably don’t know specifics or believe them.
Everyone else has probably never heard of him.
The Rangers
Minbari characters may have heard of the Anla’Shok, other character’s won't have. At this point the Anla’Shok are an old and mostly ignored faction that claims to protect Minbar from some vague existential threat, but they have only a few dozen remaining members (all Minbari) and no one takes them seriously.
Cross Species Knowledge
Most species are fairly isolated and there were no large multicultural colonies before the creation of the Babylon 4 station. This means it’s rare for individuals of one species to know much about another species beyond rumour. Some scientists and diplomats may have studied other species and may be better informed, but most characters should have very limited knowledge at the start of the game.
General
Setting