NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7860294" data-attributes="member: 7006">The thing is... I don't even think they're doing it to push an "agenda" to get everything into one "cosmology" for some grand reason (like "branding" or what not)... all they are doing is simply giving us an explanation as to WHY all this "cross-realm" stuff can and does occur.In Eberron, there is a spell called 'Tasha's Uncontrollable Laughter'.  Why is that true?  Because that spell is in the Player's Handbook and thus any players who run games in Eberron can and possibly will use that spell.Now... in the world of Eberron, who is 'Tasha'?  The answer is "No one."  There is no 'Tasha' in Eberron (unless a particular DM decides to create a person named Tasha to justify the spell name).  But then, if there's no Tasha, why is there a spell in Eberron with that person's name?  Any new player to D&D is rightly going to ask why that is?  Why does a spell-- named after a person who doesn't exist in this game world-- actually exist in this game world?  How does WotC explain how this is possible?  And the answer they give is simple.Everything in D&D is in D&D because every game of D&D overlaps in some way with every other game of D&D.  The overlap might be huge (thousands of campaigns all following the plotline of 'Lost Mine of Phandelver'), or might be exceedingly small (any massively re-written work by an enterprising DM).  But because the overlap is still there (because each game still uses stories, rules, identities, plots and trade dress from Dungeons & Dragons products)... every game of D&D is connected to every other one.  And WotC calls that 'the D&D Multiverse'... infinite worlds of D&D, with infinite games of D&D, all of which are different, and yet... all shockingly the same in many different ways.Why are there Ioun stones in Dragonlance?  And Planescape?  And Eberron?  And the Realms?  And Tal'Dorei?  Why do they all have this exact same magic item, named after the exact same person, despite almost none of these worlds having a character in their setting with this name?  How is that possible?And why does MY D&D game have Ioun stones in them, just as Hussar's D&D game has Ioun stones in them, just like Yaarel's game has Ioun stones in them-- despite all of us probably thinking "Oh no, my game world has no connection to any other game world, and damn you for suggesting otherwise!"It's because they are all games of D&D.  We are all connected to each other.  Every single one of us who plays this game.  My game of D&D is just like one of your games of D&D.  We are all a shared part of this D&D multiverse, and every single one of us knows it.Even if we don't want to admit it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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