Joël of the FoS wrote:Even when writing in the same edition, if you want to keep expanding a world, once in a while you need to reshape / modify what was written before. Otherwise, things are frozen and that limits creativity. I know his comment was about Forgotten Realms, but it applies to RL too.
While I do agree with this on paper, I just want to point out that things being frozen doesn't necessarily limit creativity. In working on the Ravenloft campaign I plan to run in the upcoming years, I've been trying to stick with published (pre-VRGtR) canon as best as possible. I've only ever changed something when it either blatantly doesn't fit, or otherwise is completely absurd. And that taught me a wonderful skill. When two events or things don't seem to operate well together, the first notion to come to mind is to alter something so they do. However, the skill I learned is to instead ask myself, "How is this true?"
For example, Jander Sunstar plays a major part in that campaign. In pre-5E canon, he is still stuck in Ravenloft, which is how he came to importance initially. Then WotC stuck him into Descent into Avernus for no reason whatsoever. How could he be in two places at once (before the VRGtR nonsense of him being cloned anyway)? Well, he can't. Most DM's might've just decided to ignore Avernus since it's unrelated to the campaign. But I thought it might not be a bad idea to try to find a way that both things could be true. So I found reason for him to escape Ravenloft only to be bound back into it after the Avernus events occur. And it made the story I want to tell so much more powerful because of how that had to happen.
And processes like this has happened multiple times as I've worked with the story I want to tell. Another one is that the Raven Queen and who she really is plays a huge part in the campaign. So I didn't want anyone to be directly related to her. But one of my players wanted to be a shadar-kai who received orders from her directly. How can this be true? Not gonna spoil it here, but suffice it to say that wrestling with that for a few weeks allowed me some solid inspiration that not only made it possible for him to be a shadar-kai, but also helped me reconcile the problem of the different origin stories for the Raven Queen in a nice narratively deep and fulfilling way. Nothing just got edited out because I didn't like it.
My point being that sometimes sticking with a fixed canon and trying to move around it creatively forces one to think outside the box more and can often lead to far richer/deeper storytelling/worldbuilding. It's well worth it if one has the time.
— onmyoji