Ravenloft co-opted Soth, and when Weis/Hickman made another DL novel, they ignored Ravenloft entirely, keeping Soth always/forever in DL.
TSR then came up with a RL excuse for it, to cover the settings.
This has all been covered before, in various interviews, but it looks like it needs to be repeated again, at least in bullet-point form.
* Margaret and Tracy were not on great terms with TSR when the decision was made to move Soth to Ravenloft. They were offered the chance to write the novel, review the manuscript, etc. (I was the Ravenloft fiction line editor at the time and made the call to Margaret.) They refused. Not a surprise. They were not even writing Dragonlance books for the company at the time.
* It was not my decision to move Soth from Krynn to Ravenloft; the decision had been made before I was assigned the Ravenloft book line as editor. However, I lobbied hard for TSR to support the idea that Soth would be able to leave Ravenloft, should Margaret and Tracy come back to writing Dragonlance.
* I reluctantly ended up writing that first Soth Ravenloft novel because, in large part, the other potential writers were proposing substantial changes to Soth's character. My premise for Soth's stay in Ravenloft--as shown in the two novels I wrote--was that he would begin his imprisonment tormented by imperfect versions of his story. He would eventually be all but paralyzed by these false tales. Then, when he reclaimed his true story--basically, got back to where he was when he entered the Mists--he would leave the Dark Domains and return to Krynn. Since it's never revealed how the Dark Powers work, it's unclear if he escaped, was taught a lesson, or simply found a pre-existing doorway out. On a storytelling level, I built the mechanism for that escape into the first novel, since I was assuming Soth would eventually be sprung. So that departure was not an excuse TSR or WotC cobbled together; it was the plan from the start, at least as far as I and several others were concerned. If WotC had not brought me back to write
Spectre, it could have played out very differently. This was, however, a case where the original plan played out largely as envisioned.
* Time moves differently on Krynn and in Ravenloft, so Soth could have spent 100 years in the Dark Domains and been gone from Krynn 10 seconds or 10 minutes or 10 years. There is no reason, in terms of continuity, that the Ravenloft books can't fit with the published Dragonlance material. At the same time, the DL material need not actively support the Ravenloft "interlude" for Soth, since it occurred in such a way that his absence need not be explained away. To Soth it might have all seemed a nightmare, but one that ended with him reaffirming his identity. So there's no need to explain that away, either.
* It is neither my call, nor Margaret and Tracy's, on whether Soth ever went to Ravenloft. The last official word I had from WotC was that the two Sithicus novels were considered official. If WotC staffers change their mind on that, we could have a different ruling. Hasbro owns the character and all the books. Last I heard, the Ravenloft novels were official. WotC and Hasbro recently approved the publication of a comic book adaptation of the Soth-in-Ravenloft story "The Rigor of the Game" in
Worlds of Dungeons & Dragons issue #3, so it seems they're still canon. Tomorrow, someone from WotC could post here and say that's changed and they're no longer official continuity. Two years from now, someone else could take over in Renton and rule them canon again.
That's the nature of shared world work.
Cheers,
James Lowder
www.jameslowder.com
