D&D General Did Dragonlance/Krynn exist in 4e canon?

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm taking them at their word

Why ever would you do that? It’s a company, its responsibility is to the shareholders, not the truth. And in this case there is no “them”, it’s just one employee, who is not an official spokesperson.

reinforced by how subsequent 5e products have been consistent with the policy

If by “reinforced” you mean “contradicted”.

5e has clearly changed lots of lore mid edition, and in any case, what happens now doesn’t tell you what went on during 4e, when they had more serious things to worry about than setting lore. The blew up the FR and almost immediately realised they had made a massive mistake. They did that purely to try and sell books, since the 3e FR book is excellent and largely rules-agnostic (I still use it). They needed to destroy it so people had a reason to buy the new book. But as you know, the changes-for-the-sake-of-changes were hated, and damaged the whole brand.

 

[mamba]

I know 2e Dragonlance made some notable retcons to 1e Dragonlance in the Tales of the Lance boxed set, for example.)

corrected some mistakes that slipped through in 1e, from what they said

 

[Parmandur]

The other thing is, that is a post from 2021. Company policies change all the time. So it doesn't tell us anything about what the policy was during 3e or 4e (and the tone suggests a recent change). And it doesn't tell us what the policy is now. Three years is a long time in policies.

To be fair, that poat was from when theyvwere sitting down to write the new Core books, so I think the whole point was to articulate moving forwards how WotC was goijg to approach older material (slectively) and what standard they would hold partners like comic books or movies to (what's in the core books). It explains a lot about how the new DMG is structured, as a partial "world bible" for parts of the D&D IP.

 

[Werthead]

WotC have taken different views over canonicity over time, since WotC isn't a single entity but many, of varied backgrounds, and the person making the decisions now isn't necessarily the same person as 15 years ago, let alone 24.

You can see that in 3E when they shrank Faerun in FR in size by 20% to create new maps, completely eliminating wide swathes of the continent, rendering some prior novels impossible to have happened and immediately nullifying products that came out just a year before (the FR Interactive Atlas). There was no in-universe explanation for this, it just happened. Whilst 2E assumed the existence of a canonical "D&D Multiverse" where all the official and homebrew settings coexisted (explored in the Spelljammer novels which started on Krynn, moved to Toril and then elsewhere, or Lord Soth being exiled from Krynn to Ravenloft), 3E abruptly separated each world into its own cosmology where none of them should ever meet again.

5E returned Faerun to its proper size and even gave a nod and wink to it in the text, and also restored the singular D&D Multiverse as a concept, meaning crossovers out of the whazoo are once again possible.

FR Wiki takes what I think is the only sensible view that all of the official products have happened and as long as they can coexist (which they can, mostly), there isn't a problem. WotC's canon policy seems to be arse-covering in case they mess something up big time in 5E versus earlier editions, but so far they haven't really done that, and have generally stuck to a very small part of the setting and been very reluctant to pin new information down so they don't have to worry about it.

Going back to DL, it'll be interesting to see what their view is on having retconned both DL and Greyhawk back to earlier points in time, whether the later events still happened/are going to happen, or they're just pretending those things never happened. Weis & Hickman's new novel trilogy seems to be at least teeing up the possibility of a timeline reset in the narrative back to the War of the Lance, suggesting the later events will be retconned out of having happened.

On a more subjective view, there seems to be at least some agreement that the quality of the new worldbuilding material coming out of WotC in the recent past has not been remotely a patch on that done in the past, particularly by those worlds' creators, so taking a minimalist view on creating new canon is probably for the best.

 

[Parmandur]

FR Wiki takes what I think is the only sensible view that all of the official products have happened and as long as they can coexist (which they can, mostly), there isn't a problem. WotC's canon policy seems to be arse-covering in case they mess something up big time in 5E versus earlier editions, but so far they haven't really done that, and have generally stuck to a very small part of the setting and been very reluctant to pin new information down so they don't have to worry about it.

The FR Wiki approach is, frankly, bananas. The stated WotC approach is for more reasonable, treating past products as a Pantry of ingredients rather than Holy Writ to be obeyed.

 

[JEB]

corrected some mistakes that slipped through in 1e, from what they said

I don't suppose you (or any other folks more expert in DL than me in this thread) could summarize the big-picture changes? I found this on the Dragonlance Nexus, but it's a bit difficult to parse (and also openly opinionated).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Looking forward to the Crisis on Infinite Krynns with dragons flying through Krynnspace to fight the Anti-Tasslehoff, who seeks to put all Krynns in his pocket.

 

[JEB]

Going back to DL, it'll be interesting to see what their view is on having retconned both DL and Greyhawk back to earlier points in time, whether the later events still happened/are going to happen, or they're just pretending those things never happened.

I would expect both settings to remain pretty static in the 5e era, with no further development... but agreed, will be interesting to see! (I expect much the same of the Realms, once those 2024-5e guidebooks come out next year.)

Weis & Hickman's new novel trilogy seems to be at least teeing up the possibility of a timeline reset in the narrative back to the War of the Lance, suggesting the later events will be retconned out of having happened.

The current official stance that the novels are their own canon, not linked to 5e canon, is probably very welcome to Weis and Hickman, since they never seemed particularly happy factoring in lore developments or retcons from the RPG side. (Though they seemed cool with matching then-current metaplot developments in the Sovereign Press 3e products, so maybe that's changed over time.)

 

[Werthead]

The FR Wikibapproach is, frankly, bananas. The stated WotC approach is for more reasonable, treating past products as a Pantry of ingredients rather than Holy Writ to be obeyed.

The FR Wiki approach collates all previously-established lore into one location, which is handy for players and creatives alike (and if you're telling me that people working on 5E have never used FR Wiki to look something up, I have a bridge to sell you), whilst not contradicting the ethos that people can use the "canon" setting or not as much as they want.

Also, FR Wiki massively predates the 5E canon policy/non-policy.

The current official stance that the novels are their own canon, not linked to 5e canon, is probably very welcome to Weis and Hickman, since they never seemed particularly happy factoring in lore developments or retcons from the RPG side. (Though they seemed cool with matching then-current metaplot developments in the Sovereign Press 3e products, so maybe that's changed over time.)

Weis was in charge of both the novels and gaming materials at that point, so it makes sense they were in lockstep.

 

[Parmandur]

The FR Wiki approach collates all previously-established lore into one location, which is handy for players and creatives alike (and if you're telling me that people working on 5E have never used FR Wiki to look something up, I have a bridge to sell you), whilst not contradicting the ethos that people can use the "canon" setting or not as much as they want.

Also, FR Wiki massively predates the 5E canon policy/non-policy.

Nah, Chris Perkins all-but-named FR Wiki as one of his pet peeves in one kf thise old Lore You Should know videos, as something they dislike giving people the wrong idea about how D&D lore works. Hence the explanation of how WotC views it.

The FR Siki approach being older doesn't make it less silly.