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D&D General Did Greyhawk/Oerth exist in 4e canon?
- Thread starter JEB
- Start date
Cordwainer Fish
Imp. Int. Scout Svc. (Dishon. Ret.)
Yeah. I play Traveller; I can reject anything a publisher says.
Voadam
Legend
G
This means looking to past sourcebooks to flesh out 5e settings can have minor changes like finding out older Greyhawk has humanoid areas where they are not a minority. Or there is the relatively major reimagining of Ravenloft which means the lore of most any 2e sourcebook is not really directly applicable to fleshing out the 5e reimagined setting the way it was in fleshing out 3e Ravenloft. It is instead similar in some ways but distinct. Like Disney’s Hercules and Marvel Comics’ Hercules.
If you want more to flesh out a 5e WotC setting prior WotC’s stuff in that setting will be of varying use in doing so.
It means that 5e stuff is specifically a reboot and reimagining and differences can be huge to small but represent a different version instead of occasional minor accidental continuity errors.
This means looking to past sourcebooks to flesh out 5e settings can have minor changes like finding out older Greyhawk has humanoid areas where they are not a minority. Or there is the relatively major reimagining of Ravenloft which means the lore of most any 2e sourcebook is not really directly applicable to fleshing out the 5e reimagined setting the way it was in fleshing out 3e Ravenloft. It is instead similar in some ways but distinct. Like Disney’s Hercules and Marvel Comics’ Hercules.
If you want more to flesh out a 5e WotC setting prior WotC’s stuff in that setting will be of varying use in doing so.
pukunui
Legend
Wasn’t the Battle of Emridy Meadows done up as a 4e adventure in Dungeon? I’ll have to check when I get home.
EDIT: Nope, I was wrong. It was written for D&D Next. I had just assumed it was for 4e since Dungeon #221 is in the 4e landscape style and there are other 4e adventures in the same issue.
EDIT: Nope, I was wrong. It was written for D&D Next. I had just assumed it was for 4e since Dungeon #221 is in the 4e landscape style and there are other 4e adventures in the same issue.
Last edited:
Senior_WotC_Janitor
Explorer
JEB
Legend
Yep, that's one of the big impacts of the policy, the older stuff isn't always easy to use with the newer stuff, and takes some reconciling at best. Obviously, though, that's not a problem for everyone! Just folks who want to run a setting as authentically as possible to published canon.
And there are other approaches as well. The FR wiki, for example, is very much trying to be authoritative for Realms canon... yet it ignores the official stance and still treats all five editions as part of Realms history. (We'll see how that goes when the 2024 5e Realms guides appear next year...)
Personally, though, I think the policy provides an opportunity for an interesting thought experiment: What does each edition's canon look like, taken in isolation for just that edition? Hence my question above. (I did a similar thing with the OD&D rules earlier this year, trying to use them in isolation, and I thought it turned out pretty interesting.)
Yaarel
🇮🇱He-Mage
I think of the 2024 DMG as either the old school (Greyhawk) or the oldest school (create your own world).
Canon is for stuff other people make for you to consume.
D&D is a game you play where the table makes its own canon, because it's like dining at the Outback. No rules, just right.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
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