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

[SkidAce]

 

[Remathilis]

Yes. It absolutely is. You're trying to pretend, out of convenience, that "adding" lore isn't changing that lore. That somehow 1+1 doesn't equal 2. Sorry, but, for someone bent on using dictionary definitions to prove your point, you're pretty cavalier about ignoring definitions when it's convenient.

This is so untenable that it is practically absurd.

By this logic, every sequel to a work of art (book, Movie or such) changes the Lore. Empire Strikes Back? Lore change. Two Towers? Lore change.

Let's go even further; every issue of a comic book changes the Lore. Every episode of a TV show changes the Lore. Every supplement, module or spin-off changes the Lore. You reduce change to a point it's a useless measurement; literally everything after the first part is Lore change.

Therefore, everything after the lbb box set is a Lore change. D&D Lore was ruined in 1975.

Good gaming.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

 

[BigBadDM]

Short Answer to OP:
No I don't care about Canon

Answer of some thought:
These are just ideas someone put on a paper. I hope those ideas are not the end-all-be-all of flexibility

Longer Answer:
I look at a campaign as it's own story in a large bookcase. Where it might relate to the book on the left in prose, and on the right the author. Others at the end of the shelf contain the same illustrations. And the first one might have a similar plot. But I am reading this novel with my players. I let them dictate what the boundaries are; and I just show them the possibilities which they create.

P.S. I don't know who has the time to read 138 pages, but I think some of the conclusion agree and disagree with my own.

 

[Hussar]

Adding lore is not changing lore. Those are two different things. If I have the lore saying that dark elves live underground and worship Lolth, that's canon. Now, later on I add in driders being drow punished for failing Lolth, no lore has been changed. Dark elves still live underground and worship Lolth. I have however ADDED to that lore, expanding canon without changing anything.

Sure you have. You have now changed the relationship of male drow with Lolth. Now, you have a goddess that will directly test and punish male drow whereas before, you didn't.

 

[Hussar]

This is so untenable that it is practically absurd.

By this logic, every sequel to a work of art (book, Movie or such) changes the Lore. Empire Strikes Back? Lore change. Two Towers? Lore change.

Let's go even further; every issue of a comic book changes the Lore. Every episode of a TV show changes the Lore. Every supplement, module or spin-off changes the Lore. You reduce change to a point it's a useless measurement; literally everything after the first part is Lore change.

Therefore, everything after the lbb box set is a Lore change. D&D Lore was ruined in 1975.

Good gaming.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

Yes, absolutely it does. Every one of your examples changes things. New ideas are introduced and relationships are changed.

Hey, remember how in Star Wars Luke and Leia were kinda having a thing? Remember how that changed after Empire when Luke discovers he's been trying to bone his sister? Not a change? Really? That relationship didn't change at all? I didn't know Star Wars and George RR Martin had that much in common.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure you have. You have now changed the relationship of male drow with Lolth.

There was no relationship of male drow with Lolth. It had not been fleshed out.

Now, you have a goddess that will directly test and punish male drow whereas before, you didn't.

The addition, yes.

 

[Hussar]

There was no relationship of male drow with Lolth. It had not been fleshed out.



The addition, yes.

Thus it is changed. Look 0+1 is one. It is no longer zero.

Star Wars is a perfect example. If A New Hope was someone's home game, maybe in that game Luke and Leia aren't so platonic. They might have a romantic relationship. Adding Luke's father, which wasn't detailed at all before radically changes that relationship.

Addition = change.

Or the Chicago example above. I don't know Chicago very well but I do know that there are quite a few expectation changes if you say you're from the Bronx or Manhattan even if both are New Yorkers.

The notion that addition is somehow different is easily disproven.

 

[Maxperson]

Thus it is changed. Look 0+1 is one. It is no longer zero.

It's 0 + 1. 0 is still a component that remains the same and is unchanged. If they add more after +1, it doesn't become 3, it becomes 0 + 1 + 2, with the first two components remaining unchanged.

Star Wars is a perfect example. If A New Hope was someone's home game, maybe in that game Luke and Leia aren't so platonic. They might have a romantic relationship. Adding Luke's father, which wasn't detailed at all before radically changes that relationship.

So what. That relationship wasn't canon. It was an addition in the home game. Sure, it might have played out differently if they knew about the relationship, but that doesn't stop it from being a canon departure even without that knowledge. The addition of Vade as Luke's father changed nothing about the canon movie relationship between the two.

 

[pemerton]

and for some reason is the god of demonic stingrays

That was in the 1st ed MM, I'm pretty sure.

 

[pemerton]

just like the all powerful Celestial Emperor that never was.

Have you read OA? There is a Celestial Bureacracy, headed by a Celestial Emperor. Spirits report to him. There is no suggestion in the text that the Celestial Emperor is, in fact, just a mis-named Parochial Governor.

EDIT: missed this earlier

It can't be at the meta level. AO explicitly says there is a western world and players can play western races and classes as Gajin. That's canon. That's RAW. That's not meta at all. The entirety of the three sentences are in-fiction and explain the thematic differences between the western world and eastern world.

There is nothing in AO canon that says the Celestial Emperor is even a god, or rules even the eastern gods, let alone the western ones called out in the setting as separate from the eastern beliefs and way of doing things.

OA says there is a Western world. It doesn't say that the gods of that world are more than petty godlings subject to the rule of the Celestial Emperor (should he wish to assert it). It doesn't say that the Western conception of the world, as unordered, is true - either in general, or even where those people come from.

Re-quoting the passage from OA p 116:

Unlike the western world, which has always tended to view non-human creatures as a loose collection of beings with no unity or cohesion, the Oriental mind has organized the world into a unified whole. One particularly strong belief is that of the Celestial Emperor, a powerful being who heads the Celestial Bureaucracy, a type of government of the spirits. Many of the spirit creatures described in this section come under his command and many hold offices or positions within the Celestial Bureaucracy.​

It can't be true that the world of Kara-Tur is a unified whole, but when you cross some boundary (which one?) the non-human creatures lose their cohesion. (Except in so far as they haven't yet been subjected to government.) Or - and to borrow from real-world geography to make the point - is the Chinese coast of the Pacific Ocean ruled by dragons, but the Californian cost not? What about Hawaii?

Equally, it can't be the case that the Celestial Bureaucracy is mere belief, and yet it has spirits as office-holders. Clearly, if it has officers (in the form of spirits) then it exists, and the belief in it is true. Which means that the non-human world is not a mere "loose collection of beings with no unity or cohesion".

Either the world is subject to a Celestial Bureaucracy of spirits and the like, or it's not.

No one playing a Planescape or MotP game supposes that the elemental planes exist only in relation to certain mortal lands. Either the world is made up of those elements, or it isn't. The Celestial Bureaucracy is in the same boat.

As to whether the Celestial Emperor is a god - as far as I know the only treatment of him in original AD&D is in DDG, where he is Shang-Ti, the supreme god of the Chinese pantheon. Seems fairly god-like. In OA itself (p 122), we are also told that the Hu Hsien (fox spirits) "greatly fears thunderstorms since the Celestial Emperor sometimes sends the Thunder God to punish the hu
hsien for its wicked ways." Generally speaking, only gods command other gods. And, on p 127, we are told that "Go-zu Oni, and the me-zu oni, form the bulk of the Celestial Emperor's army in times of trouble and insurrection. They also oversee the lands of the dead and escort the reluctant departed there." Again, I think it is fairly clear that the Celestial Emperor is a god, given that his army is made up of the guardians of the land of the dead.