I think the biggest key to avoiding taking a lore-based uppercut to your chops is to simply not take too many far-reaching liberties with the lore in the first place.Â
Many see SE's FF14 lore as "too little to work with" or at least not clear enough and in this I somewhat agree; there are some things that are very much not defined that could use some serious embellishment. That being said, however, the things that SE does give us are pretty substantive and with a bit of historical knowledge applied and some potential 'logical deduction' if you will, one can easily make calls while still sticking into the boundaries of the lore. i.e. back in 2.0 I had made my character a "Temple Knight" of Ishgard, or at least former Temple Knight to explain why he was in Thanalan. But this was long before there was ANY mention ANYWHERE of Temple Knights being a thing in lore; I looked long and hard and nothing. I don't think Temple Knights as an Ishgardian concept were introduced until 2.4 or so, in fact. Also hoping SE isn't raiding my hard drives for content because this isn't the first time this has happened. Hell it's not even just the third time >=|
So there was an example of me using the themes and concepts within the game to come up with a character concept that, even if SE had NOT made the Temple Knights a faction in the game, I still would have been okay since in my character's story his sect or "regiment" had all been wiped out, anyway. Truthfully my only concern was if they were going to call them "Temple Knights" or "Templars" which in either case is an easy fix to maintain story continuity. =)
The point is that taking liberties with lore for the sake of trying to be unique or special is like building a runway on a plateau: You only have so much ground available to you for taking off and landing and the more you stretch the lore the less runway you have and thus run the risk of sliding off and crashing into a canyon never to be heard from again =P
tl;dr headcanon responsibly because the more you put out there the easier it will be for SE to inadvertently shoot holes in by just doing their jobs.
Many see SE's FF14 lore as "too little to work with" or at least not clear enough and in this I somewhat agree; there are some things that are very much not defined that could use some serious embellishment. That being said, however, the things that SE does give us are pretty substantive and with a bit of historical knowledge applied and some potential 'logical deduction' if you will, one can easily make calls while still sticking into the boundaries of the lore. i.e. back in 2.0 I had made my character a "Temple Knight" of Ishgard, or at least former Temple Knight to explain why he was in Thanalan. But this was long before there was ANY mention ANYWHERE of Temple Knights being a thing in lore; I looked long and hard and nothing. I don't think Temple Knights as an Ishgardian concept were introduced until 2.4 or so, in fact. Also hoping SE isn't raiding my hard drives for content because this isn't the first time this has happened. Hell it's not even just the third time >=|
So there was an example of me using the themes and concepts within the game to come up with a character concept that, even if SE had NOT made the Temple Knights a faction in the game, I still would have been okay since in my character's story his sect or "regiment" had all been wiped out, anyway. Truthfully my only concern was if they were going to call them "Temple Knights" or "Templars" which in either case is an easy fix to maintain story continuity. =)
The point is that taking liberties with lore for the sake of trying to be unique or special is like building a runway on a plateau: You only have so much ground available to you for taking off and landing and the more you stretch the lore the less runway you have and thus run the risk of sliding off and crashing into a canyon never to be heard from again =P
tl;dr headcanon responsibly because the more you put out there the easier it will be for SE to inadvertently shoot holes in by just doing their jobs.
