D&D 5E Vecna: Eve of Ruin Coming May 21st!

[W'rkncacnter]

1. Nothing in Spelljammer contradicts 2e Spelljammer in any meaningful way. Yeah, there's a couple of minor differences, but, lore wise? Nope, it's the same.

completely changing the fabric of the universe is apparently a minor change.

Meh. Since you don't leave this specific area, and it doesn't actually change anything, who cares? But, sure, it's a massive change to the setting to have a couple of clerics wandering around doing stuff that no one actually hears about a couple of years before Goldmoon.

an 11th level party - possibly with one or more individuals practicing magic thought to be literally extinct - defends one of the most famous cities in the known world from a literal flying castle leading an entire army...and nobody hears about it?

maybe i just don't know enough about dragonlance, but that sounds more ridiculous then any lore change to me.

 

[Hussar]

I stand by the lack of crystal spheres and phlogiston as a fundamental change in how Spelljammer was originally conceived. As is often the case with these discussions, you are saying, "not really much of a change" but meaning, "not a change I personally care about, and therefore of little importance".

Meh. It changes virtually nothing in the setting, so,

 

[mamba]

Meh. Since you don't leave this specific area, and it doesn't actually change anything, who cares? But, sure, it's a massive change to the setting to have a couple of clerics wandering around doing stuff that no one actually hears about a couple of years before Goldmoon.

the reason we hear about Goldmoon is because she did it first and brought the gods back. If someone else did it six months before, then maybe we should have heard about that before as well.

Whether you consider that a minor thing or not is up to you. It certainly is a change.

 

[Hussar]

the reason we hear about Goldmoon is because she did it first and brought the gods back. If someone else did it six months before, then maybe we should have heard about that before as well.

Whether you consider that a minor thing or not is up to you. It certainly is a change.

The reason we hear about Goldmoon is because the books/modules that were written in the 80's talked about her. In a world without Internet or any means of communication, where travel is very difficult and dangerous, and you have some serious upheavals in the world very shortly, not hearing about something that happened isn't unreasonable at all.

Again, this only applies IF your group happens to have a cleric. Y'know, one of those classes that are not all that commonly played?

Meh, people will kick at a football game. This whole discussion started up because of claims that WotC was "massively changing" lore in recent years. Yet, funnily enough, they actually aren't. If SotDQ suddenly added new gods, THAT would be a massive change to the lore. 2e adding in the freaking Great Wheel to Dragonlance was a massive change to the lore (previously, there were no devils in DL). Having a couple of clerics pop up at around the same time as Goldmoon? Yeah, that's not a big deal.

Spelljammer still has flying ship, flying with SPelljammer helms, traveling the existing realms of D&D. A version of Spelljammer that is a thousand times more successful than the original. A new version that is VERY light on lore. As in downright emaciated. Which means that 99% of the existing lore from the old setting can be used without any changes. I know because I do it. I can go to places like the Spelljammer wiki or the old setting guides, and port them in verbatim into Spelljammer with nary a ripple.

The issue isn't that there are changes. I would certainly hope there will be changes. It's the claim that "when they started overtly messing with the setting lore". Yet, for the most part, setting lore hasn't been particularly touched at all. That's been the constant refrain all through the 5e era that WotC doesn't do lore. That their books/setting books/adventures, don't do lore. But, apparently, "recently" they've been massively changing lore? I'm not even sure how that's supposed to work.

 

[Reynard]

I have never understood why people put a huge amount weight on lore, especially in RPGs which are inherently DIY,but I appreciate that they do.

I love playing in worlds like Star Wars or Dragonlance or The Marvel/DC Universe, in part because you get to play with established lore. Haven't you ever run DL or SW with a new cast, thereby breaking the lore from the outset?

 

[mamba]

The reason we hear about Goldmoon is because the books/modules that were written in the 80's talked about her. In a world without Internet or any means of communication, where travel is very difficult and dangerous, and you have some serious upheavals in the world very shortly, not hearing about something that happened isn't unreasonable at all.

I am not saying Goldmoon should have heard of them, I am saying us, the readers / players would have.

There are 200 DL books covering a large amount of time and places. We have a history of Krynn with, presumably, all the major events (and a lot of details around that war…). Yet this was not ever mentioned anywhere…

It clearly is a deviation from established lore, how much you care is entirely up to you however. I do not even care all that much myself, I understand why they did it and I can justify it in much the same way you did. I just do not like pretending that there wasn’t any change.

 

[Echohawk]

Spelljammer still has flying ship, flying with SPelljammer helms, traveling the existing realms of D&D. A version of Spelljammer that is a thousand times more successful than the original. A new version that is VERY light on lore. As in downright emaciated. Which means that 99% of the existing lore from the old setting can be used without any changes. I know because I do it. I can go to places like the Spelljammer wiki or the old setting guides, and port them in verbatim into Spelljammer with nary a ripple.

I'm going to take issue with this. The replacement of the phlogiston and the crystal spheres with the Astral Sea in the Spelljammer campaign is a much deeper change to the setting than it might initially seem. (I've written about this before here on ENWorld.) Not only are a sizeable portion of the Spelljammer monsters (a lot more than 1%) connected to the phlogiston or the spheres in some way, but the use of the Astral flattens the cosmology in a fundamentally disruptive way. Previously, there were maps of routes from, say, Krynnspace to Greyspace through the phlogiston and getting from one to the other might require require a trip through the Astromundi Cluster. This is not the case with the Astral Sea, since travel between any two places in the Astral Sea takes the same amount of time. To get anywhere in 5e Spelljammer, a pilot merely needs to think about that location while in the Astral. Effectively, all wildspace systems are equidistant from each other. The cosmos is completely flat with every system just one astral voyage away from every other system.

This removes much of the naval flavour from Spelljammer. There can be no blockades of Realmspace by the Elven Armada, no rumours of strange beholder ships being increasingly sighted in distant crystal spheres gradually encroaching on Herospace, no ancient maps of new routes through the phlogiston to long forgotten spheres, no rumours of clockwork horrors gradually spreading from sphere to sphere.

Yes, it is possible to come up with creative ways to replicate some of these scenarios using the Astral Sea. Yes, 5e is so light in lore that it doesn't directly contradict much from the 2e Spelljammer line. But the flattening of the cosmos represents a very significant change to the setting, certainly enough to question a glib claim that 99% of existing lore can be used as is.

 

[Hussar]

I am not saying Goldmoon should have heard of them, I am saying us, the readers / players would have.

There are 200 DL books covering a large amount of time and places. We have a history of Krynn with, presumably, all the major events (and a lot of details around that war…). Yet this was not ever mentioned anywhere…

It clearly is a deviation from established lore, how much you care is entirely up to you however. I do not even care all that much myself, I understand why they did it and I can justify it in much the same way you did. I just do not like pretending that there wasn’t any change.

And yet, every single one of those 200 DL books deviated from established lore and this was considered a good thing. Again, I've gotta go with a shrug. They did not contradict established lore. They added to it. Addititive lore is always acceptable according to every single lore bunny out there. We've been told over and over and over again, that it's perfectly fine to add to lore. So, I'm really not seeing the problem here.

 

[Hussar]

no rumours of clockwork horrors gradually spreading from sphere to sphere.

And yet... that is exactly my Spelljammer campaign.

I dunno what to say. The changes seem pretty minor to me and don't actually make much difference about what kind of scenario you can design.

 

[mamba]

Addititive lore is always acceptable according to every single lore bunny out there. We've been told over and over and over again, that it's perfectly fine to add to lore.

in a way that does not contradict established lore, which generally means adding onto the end of established lore.

I want to see what Star Wars fans say when Disney releases a new movie where someone we never heard of destroys a different Death Star in some backwater part of the galaxy, a year before Luke does…

Also, I am not a lore bunny, I do not like much of the lore that was added after the War of the Lance, even though it is perfectly acceptable to do so

So, I'm really not seeing the problem here.

I noticed… but you see none with RL or SJ either, so I am not sure that you are a good judge of that (to be clear, I do not care about those either, because I do not care much about those settings, but that just means that the changes do not matter to me, not that there aren’t any)