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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6396219" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=71756]Nivenus[/MENTION], I think we have very different ideas about both the history of the game, and what it is about. That's not an objection to your posts, just a tentative observation.The Great Wheel is not presented as "core" (whatever exactly that meant in 1978). It was presented as an optional appendix, like psionics and the bard class.Nor was it in any serious way canonical to Greyhawk as a published campaign setting. I have both the original Greyhawk folio and the original boxed set. The former, to the best of my recollection, makes no references to the Great Wheel or planar matters at all. The latter has some god write-ups, in the DDG format, and so they list home planes in the same way that DDG does. But the only significant planar concepts it uses are those relevant to describing the 4 quasi/hero-deities - which is to say, the possibility of travel to the Wild West (Murlynd) is much more canonical than the Great Wheel. (And the significance of "demiplanes" and parallel worlds ahead of the Great Wheel is reinforced by such scenarios as EX1 and 2 and The Isle of the Ape. When "Return of the Eight" needs an alternative plane it sends events to the moon, not out into the Great Wheel.)I don't remember any significant planar content in the City of Greyhawk boxed set either. The module "Vecna Lives" incorporate the Plane of Ash, but the relevant location (Kas's citadel, from memory) could easily be moved to some other extra-dimensional location without loss of content, context or continuity. The Demonweb Pits in Q1 could likewise be an extra-dimensional place where Lolth hangs out. Iuz, Graz'zt and Fraz Urb'luu are demons, but nothing about their role in these Greyhawk materials requires the Abyss to take the particular character and structure it has in the Great Wheel (and Fraz Urb'luu, at least, was invented as part of Greyhawk well before the Great Wheel was conceived of).The Great Wheel is utterly peripheral to all of this Greyhawk material. I have run games set in Greyhawk for around 15 of the past 30 years. The maps are canonical. The Suel and Baklun empires are canonical. If you want to sever the link between Greyahwk's vikings and the Suel empire (as I do) you have to rewrite or ignore descriptions of kingdoms, languages and cultures. But ignoring the Great Wheel is utterly trivial, as it plays no meaningful role in any of the core published material that I can think of.The MotP, among other things, describes the residences of a whole range of gods (taken from DDG). No Greyhawk material references those gods or generates any assumption that they are part of Greyhawk's cosmology or Greyhawk canon. In fact, none of the gods described in DDG are part of Greyhawk, as per the published materials I am familiar with, except the non-human ones.This is just another respect in which the MotP does not establish Greyhawk canon, and is obviously optional rather than default or "canonical" with respect to D&D as such.Planescape was supported by at least two 3E books I can think of: MotP, and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits.Outside of Planescape I'm not sure where you see this prevalence. It is not part of AD&D, which posits the divide between Good and Evil as more fundamental (look eg at the paladin and assassin classes, and also at the way demi-humans and humanoids are presented). It is not part of Greyhawk - there are alliances between dwarves and elves (eg the Ulek states) but not between either of those peoples and orcs or goblins.My point is that no reasonable person expects Todd McFarlane's Peter Parker to match Ditko's either. Just to give one trivial example, Peter Parker lives through decades of changes in fashion and technology while aging only 15 years or so. (In that respect he's like the Hardy Boys, who as an 18 and 17 year old (? going from memory here) cram more than one week-long adventure per day into their school break.)This is why Marvel invented the no-prize - to tip the hat to those who worry about continuity while getting on with writing stories. (Perhaps WotC should hold a competition to award a no-prize to the best fan explanation of how angelic beings from Mt Celestia suddenly found themselves being forged into elemental warriors by the Primordials.)As I have said, I don't think that writing a Monster Manual, or describing a PC race, is worldbuilding. It is putting forward story elements for players to use in running their games. New story elements, or reinterpretations/re-presentations of prior story elements are just that. They don't "invalidate" the past presentations of story elements. Nothing in 4e is a comment on Planescape or the Great Wheel, let alone a declaration that it is "wrong". I'm not even sure what that would look like.They just present new stuff. Anyone who wants to use Celestial archons in his/her 4e game has an hour or two's work to do converting them (if conversion is even needed - in many circumstances it probably isn't, because the PCs probably aren't going to come into violent conflict with them, and that's really the only time a 4e statblock is needed for a monster).Your insistence that "absolutely" there was a major shift is just having us going round in circles. Your criteria for "major shift" are my minor details. To give another illustration: when 3E changed orcs from LE to CE, someone from WotC (maybe Sean Reynolds?) posted something on the WotC website saying "In our games orcs have always been more wild and chaotic than militaristic like hobgoblins, and so we're changing their alignment from LE to CE." I'm sure some people were outraged, but I don't remember an internet frenzy. (Maybe there was and I've just forgotten it, or missed it at the time.) To my mind, changing eladrin from celestial elves who live in elf-heaven to magical fey beings whose nobles and rulers are the kings and queens of faerieland is in the same category. It is shifting around the details to try and better catch what the creature is suited to as an element for play. When using older material it requires inserting "noble" before any instance of "eladrin" - because now we have non-noble eldarin who are high elves - but that is not a huge challenge to anyone familiar with both the old and the new material. Any more than someone using old stuff about orcs that trades on the Lawful Evil-ness, and who cares about such detail, has to do some minor re-writing.A major shift would be, for instance, stipulating as a default that orc and goblin spirits are allies, rather than enemies, in the afterlife; or that dwarves are friends with giants; or that Bahamut is the god of the dead. Changes to actual theme and trope.(I am not talking here about 4e changes to FR. As I said upthread, I have never played in the FR and know comparatively little about it. My general impression, though, is that both TSR and WotC tend not to say that earlier FR material was "wrong", and rather jump through tortuous plot hoops to bring the world into conformity with new material by way of "Realms-shaking events". I personally think the approach of the Living Greyhawk gazetteer is more sensible: I've never seen it suggested that the labelling of some Greyhawk personages in that book as Aristocrats, for instance, invalidated what had come before. It was just using the mechanical tools of 3E to try and describe the same fiction. By virtue of a similar methodology I have managed to run games set in GH using AD&D, 3E, two variations of Rolemaster, and Burning Wheel, without the need for "cosmology-shattering events".)If this becomes a reason never to change any core lore, that is a terrible case of the tail wagging the dog.The Dawn War and 4e's cosmology are backstory. They are not metaplot (unless you are using "metaplot" as a synonym for "backstory".) There is no 4e metaplot. For instance, is the Dusk War going to happen? If it happens, who will win it? Will Asmodeus recover the shard of evil? Will Erathis rebuild the Lattice of Heaven? Will the Far Realm swallow up the world?These are some of the main questions raised by the 4e backstory. None of the 4e sourcebooks is premised on any sort of answer to any of them. There is no metaplot; or, to borrow language from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplot" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>, there is no "overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of [the] published role-playing game campaign setting [such as m]ajor official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another". That is because there is no overarching storyline, no official continuity, no major official story events that change the world, no mandated "movement of important NPCs from one place to another". There is backstory, and then there is play. There is no attempt by the 4e authors or designers, in either their core material or their supplements, to dictate what the story consequences of play shall be.(I first made this point about 4e in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?276878-The-Plane-Above-the-Glorantha-fication-of-D-amp-D" target="_blank">this post</a> about The Plane Above.)I don't think I've ever been to any of those websites before. They don't seem to be focusing on what I care about when I watch a movie (X-Men or otherwise).Those sorts of comments remind me of this post a few years ago by Mallus:</blockquote>

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