How do you Retcon your Campaign Settings?

[victorysaber]

Does anyone ever have to do a retcon of certain elements of their campaign settings?

I know that the "Die Vecna Die" module was a sort of in-universe retcon of 2E to 3E rules, right? With some planes altering stuff.

I also think there was the "If Thoughts Could Kill" module, where you could alter the nature of psionics.

I did that once for my campaign setting, when I wanted to get rid of half-elves and half-rocs. A Far Realm lord, Nyarlathotep, went around the world collecting components to build a machine that would kill all half-human breeds (but leaving pure humans alone), and in the end he succeeded partially - all half-elves became elves, all half-orcs became orcs, and the remnants of the human bits merged together into a giant thing for the PCs to battle.

But I'm kind of looking for a way to retcon stuff without having some major world-altering villain at the helm, is it possible?

In particular, I need to retcon the planar structure of my setting. Previously I kind of had the Great Wheel cosmology, with the Prime Material Plane in the centre and multiple Material Planes surrounding it, with an ancient place known as the Land of the Ancients being a sort of transitive plane that surrounded the cosmology, and another transitive plane around that known as the Ends of the Earth.

Now I've retconned my planar structure to be more of an Eberronish style, with the planes rotating around the Material Plane. So now the Land of the Ancients is one of the alternate Material Planes, with the Ends of the Earth being a sort of stretchy border surrounding the Astral Plane.

But I don't really want a "bad guy tries to alter the multiverse but fails" kind of explanation to retcon it.

Anyone have ideas?

 

[el-remmen]

In my "Out of the Frying Pan" campaign, the final adventure dealt with a bunch of chronal anomalies - so, when the PCs finally fixed the problem - the powerful wizard/elementalist/hierophant they rescued explained that while the contradictions in the timeline would be healed by the nature of time, that some of the things they remembered before would be as if they never had been, and other that never were before would suddenly be.

I used this as an in-game justification to all the tweaks to rules I did based on my experiences of that 5 year long campaign.

 

[BlackMoria]

Have characters in any of your campaigns been to two or more of the planes and more specifically, travelled from one plane to another?

It is easy to retcon if they have not. Sages and others in your campaign world have developed an imperfect analog of the planes and the truth isn't know except by those who actually travel extensively in the planes.

It is like the real world example of astronomy.

There was the theory that the earth of the centre of the universe and the sun and every thing else rotated around the earth. And a number of planetary models were developed that supported that suppostion, supported by formulaes and observation.

Now we all know that is not the case today. Did the universe change? No. It is just that advances in science replaced a earth-centric planetary model with a sun-centric planetary model as our understanding of the universe improved.

In simple terms, just tell your players - "Well, the Great Wheel model was found by sages and scholars to be problematic and inaccurate, so current thinking is the planes are like ....etc"

 

[Kafkonia]

Now I've retconned my planar structure to be more of an Eberronish style, with the planes rotating around the Material Plane. So now the Land of the Ancients is one of the alternate Material Planes, with the Ends of the Earth being a sort of stretchy border surrounding the Astral Plane.

But I don't really want a "bad guy tries to alter the multiverse but fails" kind of explanation to retcon it.

Anyone have ideas?

Well, if your PCs have no concrete evidence that the planes are arrayed one way, you can change it behind the scenes.

But presumably they do, since you're asking.

One idea would be for the tethers that hold the planes in the Great Wheel to have gradually frayed, until eventually -- perhaps due to an excessive amount of planar travel -- they snap, sending the planes into orbit.

 

[lukelightning]

I prefer to just pretend it was "always like that."

In-story retconning is, in my opinion, a bad idea. Instead of just getting on with the game it focuses attention on the changes.

 

[victorysaber]

In my "Out of the Frying Pan" campaign, the final adventure dealt with a bunch of chronal anomalies - so, when the PCs finally fixed the problem - the powerful wizard/elementalist/hierophant they rescued explained that while the contradictions in the timeline would be healed by the nature of time, that some of the things they remembered before would be as if they never had been, and other that never were before would suddenly be.

I used this as an in-game justification to all the tweaks to rules I did based on my experiences of that 5 year long campaign.

It sounds a bit Infinite Crisis-ish (which the players have all read). But this one I like because I can blame all my changes on temporal anomalies

 

[victorysaber]

One idea would be for the tethers that hold the planes in the Great Wheel to have gradually frayed, until eventually -- perhaps due to an excessive amount of planar travel -- they snap, sending the planes into orbit.

This sounds like the perfect set-up for a multiplanar adventure.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Have the PCs go on a plane-hopping adventure. When they return, the planes are changed and everyone says they were always like this. In effect, they have returned to a near-prallel of their original world.

 

[Sejs]

...and half-rocs.

Man do I ever feel sorry for one of those parents.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'd just tell my players "Half-elves never existed in this world; any half-elf you ever met was really an elf", and leave it at that. I wouldn't bother with any sort of in-game retcon mechanism even if I wanted to change fundamental structures of the world. If I wanted to do enough radica changes, I suppose I'd just start a new campaign when we got to the natural end of the current one.