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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8123286" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I'd consider a lot of those things as major changes. The appropriation of the name "eladrin" and erasure of their existence still rankles me (and 5e still hasn't put them back; I don't care what name they use, I just want those traditional CG outsiders).It's just a matter of point of position. I tend to look at settings from a big picture position as if I'm floating outside of the Multiverse looking at it and everything in it as a complicated orrery. If you change fundamental assumptions, like the arrangement of the planes (World Axis instead of Great Wheel), the nature of species of afterlife beings of cosmic significance (all of the traditional Major Planar Races (ie, alignment exemplars) were either removed or underwent what I'd consider major conceptual, historical, or other lore changes), and the origins of the multiverse (introduction of the Dawn War and Primordials), those changes ripple out and influence everything else, and lead to a variety of smaller changes--both in published products and your own campaign, that are incompatible with older lore. Even more minor changes can often act together to create major changes.Many people are probably looking at it from a position more like an adventurer standing on the ground in Faerun. From that perspective, many of the changes are invisible or relatively minor, and you can just reinterpret individual changes that you come in contact with and don't care for.In the real world, you see this sort of thing within many major religious traditions. At the ground level their religious observances might look very similar, but at the theological and cosmological level they may have pervasive and significant differences that transform the meaning and significance of what's going on.I'm sure you are just looking at it from a different point of positioning. For me, even coming from the perspective of how messy I described making sense of all of the other settings combined is, I see 4e as so much of a change that it's a whole new level of messiness trying to integrate, and won't really contribute as more than some interesting tidbits for inspiration. From my viewpoint 2e was an expansion, 3e was an expansion and limited revision, 4e was a ground up rebuild inspired by previous material. 5e is mostly a restoration of 2e, with inclusions from all of the other editions, along with some omissions and some innovations.Fortunately it's all fantasy so as high as the stakes get are people's ability to communicate about elves and dragons from a shared perspective (which isn't nothing, and if I could go back in time I'd take over TSR and implement an "expansions, but no contradictions" approach so everyone could be on the same page with regards to official lore).That works. There are two issues you'll want to watch out for.The first is that it's going to be harder to make use of standard lore that happened to be presented in 3e Forgotten Realms material, because 3e Forgotten Realms used its own unique cosmology which is incompatible with 5e.The second is that the Dawn War pantheon, as it is a 4e exclusive (presented as an option in the 5e DMG, because the 5e DMG is pretty awesome--you should definitely review its section on creating your multiverse if you haven't already), just straight up doesn't "fit" with a lot of standard D&D lore.</blockquote>

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