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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Werthead" data-source="post: 9375517" data-attributes="member: 7045643">I would say that Forgotten Realms has an increasingly complex situation when it comes to authoritative statements. So Ed is the creator of the Realms, but he is not involved day-to-day on 5E Realms the way he was very heavily on 1-2E, somewhat heavily in 3E, and intermittently in 4E and the start of 5E (basically parachuted in to fix the Spellplague with the Second Sundering and effectively not consulted since, and not even getting an invite to the D&D movie set in the city and world he created, which still feels rough). And legally he has no power at all over the Realms. But, of course, WotC are generally happy to let him do his thing because they don't want to annoy fans and because 99.99% of the time it's not really an issue, he's just putting non-canon stuff out on DM's Guild like anyone else and if they want to do an official Thay sourcebook at some point that clashes with the Thay book he put out on DMG, they probably don't see that as a problem.We've also had the division in 5E with the creative team at Wizards: Crawford seems to regard canon as something that gets in the way of DM and PC creativity and is loathe to do anything to expand it, whilst Perkins seems to be very happy to rely on prior canon when it generates new and fun adventure ideas, but also sees the logic in not overwhelming new players with tons of research. So the current 5E creative approach - very hands-off, not interested in generating tons of new lore - is at odds with Ed's approach, telling you on Twitter how Elminster canonically prefers his eggs, and there is some tension there (I think once Ed did contradict something Crawford said about each edition being its own canon, where he said that was incorrect and Crawford did not reply).On top of that we also have Ed coming across recently as having some remorse over decisions made on the Realms by both WotC and TSR, so he's been talking a lot about his OG world map (which doesn't have Maztica, Zakhara, Kara-Tur etc on it, because they were created by other people a lot later), his original conception of places like Mulhorand and so on, which directly contradicts what has been published Realmslore for the past almost-forty years. So it's sometimes confusing if Ed is talking about his OG pre-publication, even pre-D&D Realms, or the 1E-3E version of the published Realms, or the current 5E situation.It's also a tad confusing because Ed periodically raises this point that as per his contract with TSR in 1986 when he sold them the Realms, anything he says is automatically canon, but Ben Riggs in Slaying the Dragon, who had access to the contract, doesn't say that at all, and in fact clarified via Twitter that that stipulation does not exist in the documents. It may have been a gentleman's handshake agreement back in the day, but it does not appear to be a legal one. So that might become spicy if it ever becomes an issue.</blockquote>

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