In fact, I would argue that one of the best ways to explain changes is by attributing it to actions of the PC’s, particularly if you’ve played through a very long campaign in which the players were much invested in the past. It gives them a feeling that they actually have an effect on the world and the story, instead of just starting over fresh every time.

I favor 3.5 myself, but as an example, perhaps some or all eladrin were pulled from the heavens as the result of some failure on their part in the last campaign. Perhaps the Dragonborn were savages beyond some just broached frontier or even a highly developed nation in their own right, analagous to when westerners first arrived in China, where the party was exploring, making them viable PC’s in the next campaign (by which time there’s trade and travel back and forth between there and the former PCs’ homes). Monte Cooke ran the transfer from 2d to 3d in Ptolus, if I recall aright, with the disappearance of the Vallis Moon after his players foiled an attempt by the Galchutt to break their chains. If Asmodeus really has won the Blood War in your campaign, it could be due to the previous players’ direct intervention, if the campaign went high enough level, or just the unintended consequence of someone the cheated, killed, or helped out.

4e works right out of the box as a new setting of course, making no explanations necessary, but if I ever do switch I think I’ll do my best to keep the history intact.

I understand that for those who tend to run shorter-term campaigns anyway, or whose long-term campaign has come to a natural end, starting over probably seems entirely logical, and continuity not so important.

However, as someone who migrated a long-running Greyhawk campaign from 1e to 3.5e, I entirely appreciate your desire to rationalise continuity. I understand that new rules come along and you see advantages in them for your existing campaign, and you want to find a way to use them without junking it or having its flavour fundamentally altered in an abrupt way that doesn’t make sense.

When you’re faced with these continuity questions, I think you have to make a choice between taking on board the new setting flavour that comes with the new rules or else trying to preserve the existing flavour. With my jump from 1e to 3.5e I chose the latter – but planar excursions are a not uncommon experience in our campaign and so I save a lot of the 3.5e material that seems a little ‘outlandish’ in the context of Greyhawk’s quasi-medieval setting to populate those adventures.

Lets’ also not forget that the Flanaess is only a small corner of Oerth, and that there are plenty of places ‘off map’ for people to adventure in where things may be different, or where, say, dragonborn or eladrin refugees might arrive from.

As an aside – Dragonborn are a 3.x invention anyway, described in ‘Races of the Dragon’ IIRC, although a little different to the way they are presented in 4e. And there are a number of other draconic humanoids in 3.x, and a ‘draconic’ template.

Anyway, good article. As for myself, I’m sticking with 3.5e for the foreseeable future, but I think some people may find this useful.

So you know what I’m talking about, here’s a link to one of those articles.

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drdd/20081208

@Tyson Our playgroup had been playing an Eberron campaign but we basically put that aside when 4E came out and we started a new collaborative setting (mostly because we all wanted to try DMing in order to really learn the new system)

Really I must pose one question in that did people do this for the change from 2edition to 3rd? Try to make everything fit together? Again they are almost two different games.

I really liked your point on the “old magic” is a misconception held by commoners. In the event of a cataclysm or something of that nature and all magic is lost it would would take about three generations for all of the knowledge to be lost. And your thoughts on the survival of the fittest being an explanation for the monsters is quite thoughtful.

Continuity is *highly* overrated. It’s a game. It’s fun. Don’t sweat the details unless they’re important to the game at hand — and even then, the details should be setting related, not *rules* related.

I think if one were to update the old Greyhawk-ish setting, the easiest was to handle it would be somewhat similar to what WotC did with Forgotten Realms, move it all forward a significant chunk of time and put a serious event occur in the interim. I myself always like having a war of the gods, that’s such an effective trope and isn’t too terribly clichéd.

Every other setting so far has included explanations on all the new stuff.

In my own campaign setting I make vague allusions to the 3e to 4e conversion by stating that there used to be a world before the present with all the 3.x trappings such as reality-collapsing 9th and epic level spells, Pun Puns and other game breakers and things like that, but that they were destroyed in a cataclysm after the fabric of reality essentially grew very sick of them.

So I guess good old cataclysms just work well for this kind of thing, like our friend the Spellplague.