TY - INPR Y1 - 2024/04/13/ PB - SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC A1 - Wee, Kellynn N2 - Transmedia storytelling is a strategy adopted by media franchises and brands to create participatory story-worlds for their consumers; it incorporates a range of forms, actors, and texts, all of which have varying degrees of narrative authority in determining the events that occur. This article focuses on tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to show how play cultures in Singapore are shaped by transmedia storytelling techniques. In doing so, it makes two contributions to existing research: first, it shifts scholarly focus from game texts to player practice, showing how communities of play are created through players? emergent usage of transmedia storytelling techniques. Second, it describes a player practice of soft canon, which I theorise as an approach to shared world-making that prioritises the emotional resonance of narrative details over a positivist accounting of narrative events. The concept of soft canon reveals a new perspective on how communities create and sustain intersubjectively imagined worlds. AV - public JF - International Journal of Cultural Studies EP - 19 N1 - © The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). ID - discovery10191835 TI - ?If it's held dear, it?ll get pushed through?: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13678779241244407 ER -