D&D 5E D&D Lore Changes: Multiversal Focus & Fey Goblins of Prehistory

WotC's Jeremy Crawford revealed a couple of the lore changes in Monsters of the Multiverse.

• The big shift is toward the multiverse as the game's main perspective rather than a specific setting. The game is shifting towards a multiversal focus, with a variety of worlds and settings.
• Universe-spanning mythical story beats, such as deep lore on goblinoids going back to 1st Edition, and the gods they had before Maglubiyet. Prior to Magulbiyet unifying them, goblinoids were folk of the feywild in keeping with 'real-world' folklore.
• Changelings aren't just Eberron, but they've been everywhere -- you just don't necessarily know it. Their origin is also in the realm of the fey.

D&D 5E - A Compilation of all the Race Changes in Monsters of the Multiverse

Over on Reddit, user KingJackel went through the video leak which came out a few days ago and manually compiled a list of all the changes to races in the book. The changes are quite extensive, with only the fairy and harengon remaining unchanged. The book contains 33 races in total, compiled and...

www.enworld.org

 

[Jer]

• The big shift is toward the multiverse as the game's main perspective rather than a specific setting. The game is shifting towards a multiversal focus, with a variety of worlds and settings.

Ah - An "Old School" approach! ducks as people hurl things as his head

However seriously - this is where I always felt D&D was back in the old days. Everyone's campaign world was an alternate world and your world wasn't constrained by the lore of Greyhawk or Toril or Mystara or whatever - even if you were playing on a published world it was "your" world not TSRs and you could ignore what you wanted.

This was even codified in the BECMI rules as they needed some explanation for why you'd want to by AD&D products for your D&D game

And hey - a multiversal approach means you need more settings to fill that multiverse doesn't it? That should surely make the folks who have been asking for more published settings and updates to old settings happy, right ducks as people hurl things at his head

 

[Shardstone]

Hmm. How much of this lore is in the book?

Its literally a paragraph or two per race and that's it.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

That’s a good guess, sure.

Sure, they could surprise us with another adventure book, but the campaign world itself definitely does not belong to WotC, and never has, but people just think it they published and/or distributed anything, then they own it. Same misconception happens in the video game and movie and TV worlds, where companies do distribution deals, but never actually own the property.

 

[Scribe]

Its literally a paragraph or two per race and that's it.

Yeah, expected but not appealing to me.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't see any particular reason to expect Critical Role to distance themselves from WotC: indeed, based on what happens in the Box Machina show, it wouldn't surprise me if they made some sort of broader longterm deal for IP sharing.

 

[darjr]

I just thought maybe there was an announcement.

 

[el-remmen]

Ah - An "Old School" approach! ducks as people hurl things as his head

However seriously - this is where I always felt D&D was back in the old days. Everyone's campaign world was an alternate world and your world wasn't constrained by the lore of Greyhawk or Toril or Mystara or whatever - even if you were playing on a published world it was "your" world not TSRs and you could ignore what you wanted.

This was even codified in the BECMI rules as they needed some explanation for why you'd want to by AD&D products for your D&D game

And hey - a multiversal approach means you need more settings to fill that multiverse doesn't it? That should surely make the folks who have been asking for more published settings and updates to old settings happy, right ducks as people hurl things at his head

Exactly.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

This lore sounds good. I’ve advocated a Multiversal meta- setting for a long time. And I’m glad the goblin fey lore is additive rather than revisionary.

 

[Morrus]

Its literally a paragraph or two per race and that's it.

Well that's potentially 66 paragraphs! Quite a chunk of text!

 

[Shardstone]

Well that's potentially 66 paragraphs! Quite a chunk of text!

I wasn't complaining, but please Morrus, you are smarter than that. Two small paragraphs that are generic is not what that person, or what other people who want lore, are asking for. Adding it all up and saying there's a lot of text is a meaningless gesture and only serves to invalidate the desires of other people. This doesn't mean their desires are worth more, and isn't a commentary on the text in question, but what you replied with me was basically like trying to use a loophole to proven argument.