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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8436234" data-attributes="member: 5948">Ok, as someone who's been vocally annoyed at various FR canon changes since 4e came along, I'll have a go at answering the OP.From an everyday, home-table point of view, canon changes matter because they cut down the amount of published resources that are consistent with your game.  For example - running a War of the Lance game?  Well, too bad, if canon has moved ahead and all the recent Dragonlance material is War of Souls era, there's pretty much nothing here you can use.  That makes more work for you, as a DM.However, sometimes canon changes can be good.  The 4e-era timeline rewind of Dark Sun to just post Kalak's death is a good example (I know there's other canon changes to Dark Sun that happened around the same time, I'm speaking specifically about the timeline thing here).  This made a lot of post-Kalak 2e-era source material useless (Beyond the Prism Pentad, basically all of the Revised boxed set...) but was nonentheless recieved positively because it fixed a widely-disliked element of the setting and let PCs be the big heroes rather than NPCs.For me, a canon change has a legitimately negative effect if it's both a) bad, and b) destructive.  'Bad' is of course 100% subjective.  'Destructive' is a bit more easily defined - where canon changes in new supplements render old supplements incompatible with the new. Historical examples:- the sudden introduction of Maztica into FR.  Bad but non-destructive.  In general, the Maztica line was generally seen as 'bad' for its naked copying of a real-life culture, and for its very 2e-era quirk of having NPCs do all the really cool and interesting stuff in some fairly cookie-cutter novels before the boxed set was even released and PCs even got the chance to set foot on the place.  However, the Maztica line was not destructive.  Sure, it introduced a brand new continent out to the west somewhere which had never been there before, but it had minimal impact on the rest of FR, so its abrupt existence didn't render any past material contradicted.- as discussed above, the 4e windback of Dark Sun's timeline.  Destructive, but not bad.- the Spellplague in FR.  Pretty much the exemplar of how not to do canon changes.  Bad, and profoundly, profoundly destructive.  The spellplague stands almost alone in the deliberately malicious way in which is systematically went and voided all possible usefulness of prior sourcebooks with the new material.  Even faraway obscure parts of the game world were dropped into the sea or turned into magical/radioactive wastelands - and this was done in the space of a sentence or two, without any real attempt to detail anything new and interesting and playable that had sprung up in their place.  The Spellplague was a deliberate attempt to make your vast collection of pre-4e Forgotten Realms sourcebooks not just somewhat out of date (all FR stuff was, given how continually the novel series changed the setting in those days) but actively unusable in the 'new' Realms.  That made it reeeeeal easy to hate.- As for the gold standards of canon changes - not bad and not destructive - well, that's a tough one!  I'll go with the 4e introduction of the Feywild.  Much as I hate the name (even a decade plus later!) the whole concept gave fey, which were prior to this a very neglected critter type, a place and society to belong to, and interesting things to do, and ways for PCs to get involved with them, in a way that was additive to and enriched existing settings, rather than breaking them (it still shouldn't have been in Dark Sun though!)  In summary.  Make your canon changes good and non-destructive, and everyone will love you.  Make them good and destructive, and you'll get a majority-good reception, with bonus points for courage, and even the people who hate everything you did will find stuff to mine in your material.  Make them bad and non-destructive, and even if people don't like the new stuff you're introducing, it won't ruin anyone's day or obsolete their collection.  Bad and destructive on the other hand, and may Vecna have mercy upon your soul...</blockquote>

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