I have spent a good part of the last couple of years helping map the Star Trek timeline. For Star Trek Timelines, my co-writers and I went back to the episodes, and to the scripts where we could get them, trying to pin down what was actually said and shown on screen. It is detailed, satisfying work, and I am proud of it.

It also taught me something that might sound odd coming from a timeline guy: canon can open a game up, and it can just as easily close one down.

A lot of what many of us carry around as canon is not quite what aired. It is fan canon — the version built up from novels, reference books, convention conversations, and years of confident repetition. Much of it is thoughtful, and some of it holds up well. Some of it tends to wobble the moment a newer show revisits the period. The dates around the Eugenics Wars have shifted over the years, and even something as basic as when the Cardassian border wars began can look different depending on which source a person trusts most.

Working on the book meant living with those wobbles, not ironing them flat. Star Trek has been telling stories for sixty years, across many creative teams, and most long-running story worlds pick up a few contradictions along the way. That is not a flaw in the franchise. For a gamemaster, it can be room to move.

Here is how I try to use canon at my table.

First, I let canon do what it does best: give us a shared starting point. A familiar ship class, a known treaty, a planet your players have seen on screen — those details mean the table can begin playing from common ground instead of spending a session on exposition. Canon is a springboard in that sense. It launches the story your group is about to tell.

Second, I try not to let it settle arguments it was not built to settle. If play stops for twenty minutes while we litigate whether a particular technology existed in a given year, the timeline has quietly become the gamemaster, and most of us did not gather around the table for that. A quick ruling, noted down so we stay consistent in our own campaign, usually serves the evening better than a perfect ruling would.

Third, when canon and a good idea pull in different directions, I tend to protect the good idea. Jim Johnson put it plainly on Continuing Conversations: tell your own version of the story. Make it up. That does not mean tossing out continuity for the fun of it. It can mean deciding that in your campaign, the border war started a little earlier, or that the ship your crew serves on was refit in a way no reference book has catalogued yet. Your table’s version becomes the version that matters for the people playing it.

I find that the research makes this easier, not harder. The more I have dug into what is actually on screen, the less precious I feel about defending a single timeline. I can appreciate the care behind the details and still leave space beside them for the characters your group creates, the sectors they visit, and the history they make together as they play.

So map the timeline if that work brings you joy — it certainly brings me plenty. Read the scripts, compare the dates, fill a shelf with reference books. Then bring all of that to your Star Trek Adventures game as material, not as a fence. Canon can give your crew a universe with a deep past. What they do next is the part no timeline can write for them.