D&D 5E Do you care about setting "canon"?

[Hussar]

Just to add to the point about gnomes being 3 meters tall, I was just reading the Monster ENCyclopedia article on Nightmares: http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?3807-Monster-ENCyclopedia-Nightmare#.WIf_8bFh3BJ

Now, what does a Nightmare look like? Are they skeletal or beefy? The appearance has shifted quite a lot over the years. The alignment has shifted from Neutral with evil tendencies to outright evil. So on and so forth. 5e Nightmares are quite different from what came before:

The most notable change to the 5th Edition nightmare is the introduction of a completely new origin story. Nightmares are now created by removing the wings of a pegasus and transforming the noble creature to evil using dark magic. This lore comes out of left-field, and seems a little impractical. Once created, can nightmares breed with each other? If not, then who has been going to all the trouble of capturing pegasi to turn into nightmares? And to what end?

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/conten...clopedia-Nightmare#.WIf_8bFh3BJ#ixzz4WjVd0FlT

If lore is so important as people here are claiming, why aren't people up in arms about this? 5e is chock a block with all sorts of changes like this, but, it heralded as one of the best Monster Manuals ever produced. So, you'll have to excuse me for being a little confused when those claiming that lore is so important and must not be changed except with very careful consideration, turn a very blind eye to the changes that have been recently made.

 

[ccs]

Yes, you never will see a Gnome time traveling in a Dragonlance trilogy.

1) This is true, I will not see that. Nor alot else. Because I have so many other, better, books to read than DL novels....

2) I never said the gnome had to be the time-traveler.

3) Are time-traveling gnomes a thing nowadays (and by that I mean mid-90's - present) in DL?

 

[Shasarak]

1) This is true, I will not see that. Nor alot else. Because I have so many other, better, books to read than DL novels....

2) I never said the gnome had to be the time-traveler.

3) Are time-traveling gnomes a thing nowadays (and by that I mean mid-90's - present) in DL?

The short version is, yes there are time traveling Gnomes in Dragonlance.

 

[Hussar]

The short version is, yes there are time traveling Gnomes in Dragonlance.

Really? And this is being asked in all honesty, what book is that from? In Time of the Twins, kender, gnomes and dwarves are forbidden from time travel because of worries that they will change the past. Tasselhoff travels back in time, more or less accidentally and certainly unintentionally.

I've forgotten the name of the magic item that they use (and my google fu has failed me) but, as I recall, it wasn't a gnomish one.

---

Ahh, right, google to the rescue. It's a spell that Par Salian uses to send them back in time and Tas hitches a ride while poly morphed into a mouse. Only races touched by chaos (the Grey Gem) can change time, everyone else cannot. Thus the introduction of Tas allows for Raistlin's plan to go forward.

But, I'm still unaware of time traveling gnomes in the setting. But, be that as it may, it doesn't really apply here does it? There's nothing about this gnome being a time traveler. IOW, the back story of this character requires some futzing about with canon since wild magic isn't introduced to the setting until decades after the War of the Lance. Again, it's funny that all you kind folks who've been jumping up and down on me about not getting canon right would so casually ignore that rather salient point.

 

[Shasarak]

Really? And this is being asked in all honesty, what book is that from? In Time of the Twins, kender, gnomes and dwarves are forbidden from time travel because of worries that they will change the past. Tasselhoff travels back in time, more or less accidentally and certainly unintentionally.

I've forgotten the name of the magic item that they use (and my google fu has failed me) but, as I recall, it wasn't a gnomish one.

How can you quote from one of the books where a Gnome time travels and come to the conclusion that they are forbidden from time traveling? Would that make it the shortest trilogy of all time?

 

[Hussar]

How can you quote from one of the books where a Gnome time travels and come to the conclusion that they are forbidden from time traveling? Would that make it the shortest trilogy of all time?

Bwuh? What gnome time travels? I'll admit, it's been a long, long time since I read the novels, but, Tasselhoff (goddamit autocorrect, stop changing that to Hasselhoff) isn't a gnome. He's a kender. What gnome time travels? AIR, it's Carmen, Raistlin, the girl whose name .... Chrysania (?) and Tasselhoff who time travel.

I don't recall any gnomes in there.

 

[Shasarak]

Bwuh? What gnome time travels? I'll admit, it's been a long, long time since I read the novels, but, Tasselhoff (goddamit autocorrect, stop changing that to Hasselhoff) isn't a gnome. He's a kender. What gnome time travels? AIR, it's Carmen, Raistlin, the girl whose name .... Chrysania (?) and Tasselhoff who time travel.

Hasselhoff would make a great Kender.

I don't recall any gnomes in there.

The Gnome you can not recall is Gnimsh, the first gnome ever to have every invention work as intended.

 

[Hussar]

As I recall though, isn't he dead and his device destroyed? Be that as it may, we're still talking about events significantly after the war of the lance. One gnome, found in the Abyss no less is hardly something widespread in the setting.

IOW a wild Mage in the War of the Lance is not canon. Age of Mortals? Sure. If I make a priest of Myrkul in a FR game set after the time of Troubles I can't complain that my God is dead.

In the same way I can't make a priest of Mystra set before the Time of Troubles and call it a canon character.

This isn't an issue of the setting lore changing so much as a mistake in the reading of the history of the setting.

 

[Shasarak]

As I recall though, isn't he dead and his device destroyed? Be that as it may, we're still talking about events significantly after the war of the lance. One gnome, found in the Abyss no less is hardly something widespread in the setting.

You can not say that the events happened significantly after the war of the lance when they time traveled to before the Cataclysm. That is the whole point of time traveling that no event is significantly distant to another.

And of course we are just comparing that to one Gnome Wild Sorcerer which is, as you say, hardly something wide spread in the setting.

IOW a wild Mage in the War of the Lance is not canon. Age of Mortals? Sure. If I make a priest of Myrkul in a FR game set after the time of Troubles I can't complain that my God is dead.

In the same way I can't make a priest of Mystra set before the Time of Troubles and call it a canon character.

The War of the Lance covered large swaths of Ansalon and we were following the travels of one or two groups so it is a pretty sweeping statement to call something or another as non-canon. We did not even really see much of Mount Nevermind to be able to make a full determination of what a real Dragonlance Gnome is because Gnimsh certainly does not fit the standard model.

This isn't an issue of the setting lore changing so much as a mistake in the reading of the history of the setting.

I would agree with that.

 

[Mirtek]

At the end of GDQ, Lolth is dead. That is the only realistic successful outcome of that module.

Yet the canon ending diesn't have to be a succes.

Every Drow supplement that comes out after that module is basically telling those players that nothing they did mattered.

Which they should have known from the Start. Nothing an individual gaming group does ever matters to the canon of the game. They might get the same result that the canon ending assumes, but that's more or less by Chance.

Complete retcon.

Not a retcon because there is nothing told that can be retconned until the next supplements reveal the canon results of the previous ones

Even though it's in a 100% official supplement that Lolth is dead,

it is not in this supplement. It's merely one of the many possible outcomes in it. Only one of those can become the canon events and this we are being told by later supplement
we can completely ignore that and that's fine.

What's the criteria here? How do you judge what gets to be canon and what doesn't?

Canon is whats used in the official metastory in the official releases. DDQ presents possible epilogs based in whether the PCs win or die and the next release then reveals which one became the official version in which further developments will be based