So you get the first editions that due to being both new territory conceptually and also not a sure thing economically that you get a lot of mysteries. Both WoDs and Exalted 1e are full of a bunch of stuff where at a certain point they stop providing answers, or at least not concrete answers for events and locations in the settings.

And this is fine! It’s great! It makes the World of Darkness feel like a proper horror thing. It makes Exalted’s Creation feel like a proper post-post apocalypse. You don’t need definite answers for everything because sometimes the margins are where you want to play.

And then the game gets big and enough fans have talked and argued and theorized and conjectured and rumored and unbelieved that the authors (who might be and often are some of those same fans) decide “okay it needs a definitive answer!” And then you get the second editions.

Vampire the Masquerade 1e has a lot of bloodlines with mysterious origins. Almost all of them somewhere in 2e or Revised 2nd get a specifically named founder and exact year and location for their founding and often what they were made for.

Exalted does this more than any of the other lines; it feels like they had someone go through the entire first edition painstakingly to find anywhere they had a weird location or relic and specify when it was made (always the high first age) and who made it (always a solar) and why they did (always the most obvious reason).

Of course there are new mysteries set up, but now the function has changed. If 2e WoD or Exalted posed a question about a character or occurrence you could rest assured a later book in the line answered it. The function of the game line was not to pose ideas it was now to give you the sort of definition you’d see in fandom wikis later on.

And then there is always an overcorrection.

Chronicles of Darkness kind of did it although a lot of that was more trying to carve a unique identity by breaking some of the rules set before.

But look at say Vampire 5th edition, where so much of the setting and lore has been dumpstered by a “move fast and break things” take on the canon.

Or Exalted 3e where the lines initial developers decided to say that anything introduced in 2e that could be superceded by 1e was, and even where it wasn’t some things where just now non-canon if they felt like it.

And sure I cheered when the shithead pair said Dreams of the First Age was decidedly not canon any longer, I’m human, I have a heart. But then we got things like “no magitech ever even where it made sense” and intentionally fucking the scale of the setting to the point that didn’t make sense anymore just to ~~own the libs~~ remove certain 2e plot points.

And the worst thing is is that in both those cases they’ve had to walk things back.

V5 basically declares all the Sabbat wandered off to a Lick to go play rouchambeau against The Elder Gods then had to spent like 4 books walking it back incrementally until just giving up and giving them a book.

Ex3 had to keep going “no magitech ever!” “Except Warstriders.” “Yeah except the gundams.” “And some of the vehicles” “yeah airships and shit too” “or the robot limbs or beamklaves.” “Right can’t forget the pulp/sci-fantasy staples.” “And the shit Lookshy uses.” “Right Bubblegum Crisis was still good in TYOOL 2015, but BESIDES ALL THAT--“

And don’t get me wrong! You can have a retcon. A good retcon is always vital to lore.

But there is doing it because you thought of a good reason to change things or at the very least recognize that the old established things were bad and making it stagnant.

And then doing it because spite and how dare you the end user think you know better.

There is an OSR mega dungeon written by a certain pants shitting rapist that has a recurring character in the encounters.

I forget his name but he’s basically there to cause problems and make the PCs look and feel like chumps. His established lore is that whatever a player proposes ICly or OOCly for who or what he is is wrong for at least the first three to five guesses. Ditto for why he’s showing up and what he wants.

And the book even says like, is that contradictory or make for a worse story? So be it! The important thing is fuck the players for thinking they knew the answer, smug pricks!

And tbh a lot of the lore in modern Onyx Path editions feels like that.

It’s not about getting the air of mystery back or giving newer more fun answers most of the time.

It’s fuck your for thinking your reading the books enthusiastically mattered!

Actually now that I think about it the 2e Chronicles books somehow do both.

Did you like the mystery of the VII? Fuck you. The Ahkud are explicitly canon and also might be dead.

Did you like that there seemed to be a lot of things that led to the downfall of the Julii and their seeming degeneration into the Ventrue that was half lost to time? Eat shit they’re now retconned to be essentially one continuous clan except for some of them got FUCKED UP GHOST OWLS WOOO

(The Strix rule though.)

I don't know fuckall about WoD lore but the thing that gets me about ex3 is like.

listen I thought 2e's lore was an unnavigable Hot Mess of Nonsense but 3e somehow made it...worse?

because they tried to put in GoT realism without any understanding of scale or logistics, and also couldn't seem to agree on if they were scaling back the tragic tone of the world or not.

and even when new devs took over I feel like they struggled to find an answer to it.

creation is in a pretty bleak spot at the point when the jade prison breaks. whether or not that can be saved is supposed to be the overall crux of the setting.

but like...every dev wants to make their pet city state awesome and each region has such clear "these people are good and these people are Bad" that it feels like it's always working against itself. moreso in 3e where it seems like it's just Reacting to fandom takes about 1e/2e.

the Duo Shitnugget reacted in an incendiary way, the team that took over from them seemed to be trying to reconcile it but it's still very.

I’ll be honest man I feel like most the authors forgot that that was a question that the game is about like 15 years ago.

probably.

I feel like eventually everything that made exalted interesting in spite of it's (many, glaring) flaws was sort of boiled out in service of arguing about who was Right about the setting

This might be why I like Essence so much, it doesn’t seem to have the word count to get lost in this nonsense.

well, and because essence was about paring everything down, it really returns to asking questions about the setting instead of "what incredibly bullshit thing can I do with seventeen charm combos"

Part of it is because Grabowski was a lunatic libertarian in just such a way that 1e Exalted worked perfectly philosophically. Are the Solars right or wrong? Irrelevant! Great man theory dictates if you’re some kind of shiny you have the right to be the hero or not!

you're not wrong but the way I just grimaced

I guess that really is the fatal flaw

the readers pick up on this theme/idea that maybe nobody is really "right" but the world's dying and you have to make the most of it

but grabowski was never interested in that question

On the contrary I think that he was but his answer was “whatever side your players pick” which honestly might be the right answer.