[RPG] What official lore events have marked the changes between editions

dungeons-and-dragonslore

KRyan's answer to "How would a group get from Toril to Ravenloft and back?" mentions that:

Only two characters have ever managed to free themselves from Ravenloft, and the only one to actually manage to stay free, Vecna, broke reality so hard in the process that it changed the AD&D 2e rules into D&D 3e rules.

This made me wonder what other lore events have caused editions to change.

What events in official D&D lore have "caused" the in-universe changes that the mechanical changes between editions reflect/imply?

My question is not limited to any specific setting; I'm interested in all official settings that may have had events that resulted in an edition change.

Best Answer

The following answer summarises the events from the Forgotten Realms lore that coincide with the edition transitions: Edition transitions in the Forgotten Realms. It also mentions Die Vecna Die! (which takes place in Greyhawk, Ravenloft and Planescape), ie. the event that you describe in your question as the in-game cause for the transition from the 2e to 3e.

For the other settings, there are a couple of events described, for most, no explanations are given at all. For quite a few of the settings, the mechanical edition updates were done only through articles in the Dragon magazine articles, and did not attract long enough story arcs and hence no transition stories (as discussed in the answer by KRyan). Yet, I will try to list those that I know:

  • For the Greyhawk setting, the transition from 1e to 2e is described in a series of adventures called the Fate of Istus. This series describes a plague that ravages Oerth and the goddess Istus's re-evaluation of its inhabitants, putting every character class through a Test of Fate, with those classes failing (monks and assassins) disappearing.
  • Chaos War, also known as the Second Cataclysm, of the Dragonlance setting coincides with the introduction of the SAGA system transitioning from the 2e AD&D (though later modules gave the option to keep on playing with 2e rules as well, since SAGA was vastly different). It is a war between the people of Ansalon along with the gods and Chaos, an ancient entity and the father of gods. At the end of the war, the gods leave Krynn.
  • The transition of Dragonlance from the SAGA system to 3e follows the events described in the War of the Souls trilogy.
  • One could argue that the adventure in the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set is also a transition between different sets of Immortals rules.

Honorable mention:

  • The set of six modules that start with RA1: Feast of Goblyns describe the Grand Conjuction, which moves the Ravenloft setting from its initial 2e description in Ravenloft: Realm of Terror boxed set (1990, "the black box") to its revised 2e form in the Ravenloft Campaign Setting (1994, "the red box").