So there's a bit of a kerfuffle surrounding the release of Monsters of the Multiverse and the discontinuation of older products, which may or may not be a good idea (I'm sure there's another thread to hash that out somewhere) but it has got me thinking:  What would you think is the best way to handle lore?  5th edition started out with with Forgotten Realms as the default setting so I doubt we'll be getting another flagship like that, but what about in larger sourcebooks like Eberron?  Or in smaller bites like the gazetter in Baldur's Gate: DiA, or the Monstrous Compendium that dropped for free last month?  Or maybe you have another thought altogether?

I voted setting book, but I really think it should be a core setting book with periodic gazetteer style supplements to expand on the main setting book.

Quote from Golaryn >>

I voted setting book, but I really think it should be a core setting book with periodic gazetteer style supplements to expand on the main setting book.

The perfect answer. 

I went for the gazetteer style because that's the closest poll option to what I'd like, which is all the lore on all the settings (as well as suggestions for DMs/players to make their own) in one book. In terms of digital that's doable, in print it's a lot less likely without the book getting incredibly cumbersome. Second to that setting books would be preferable, but so far I'm not impressed by most of 5E's adventures that have passable setting info.

Setting book all the way. I'd go as far as to say that the base of D&D should have no lore. At least, no setting-specific lore, like the general alignments of specific versions of the races in the game or how common each race is. 

If you want official lore, buy a setting book or adventure. If you want mechanics, buy the core rulebooks and splat books. 

The problem with dividing up the lore and the mechanics is that, really, the mechanics should flow from the settings. Orcs in a setting where they are simply bipedal beasts will have different stats to where they're just like Humans but with green skin to a setting where they're like Endgame Hulk. Orcs in Spelljammer, where they're expected to be flying and maintaining what amounts to be spaceships are going to be vastly different from the Tolkienesque Orcs that most people think of when you mention the term "Orc".

Every setting would then, logically, have to have its own bestiary and essentially break each setting off into its own game which merely shares the same base resolution mechanics. I'm not sure that's feasible.

I'm not sure that there is going going to an easy way to keep both those who homebrew most stuff and those who mostly take what's given as-is happy. 

I would like them to publish campaign settings like the 3rd edition ones. That is, books whose main content is lore, a lot of lore, of a specific setting.
But that is not going to happen. Why? Well, on the one hand, because those books are already published, and can continue to be purchased. Why publish a new book of, for example, Forgotten Realms, when you have the excellent 3rd? Unless you are going to make substantial changes, which I don't think is a good idea, what you have there is perfectly fine for 5th edition.
But it is also that today you have all the lore you want just a click away. You no longer need a lore book.
That said, what I would like to see is a lot more lore in Spelljammer than is usual in 5th edition. These settings do not come out from 2nd, and the material has been a bit outdated. And the same if they will release a totally new setting, something that does not seem to be in the near future.

Would the Gazette style lore magazine be something you buy at the store/on DDB, or be something free like Sage Advice / Dragon+?

I voted Setting Book, because I love having everything in one place. Similarly, the free stuff can be printed out and organized into a binder, which magazines are not as good for.

I feel like the setting book method would be nice, you get to choose what location you play at and have fun in your favorite setting.

However, I wish that more (not all) of the adventure books were setting-aignostic (if I can spell that right) so people can still run premade adventures in their favorite world without needing to create one or have them in the setting book.

Quote from Erokow32 >>

Would the Gazette style lore magazine be something you buy at the store/on DDB, or be something free like Sage Advice / Dragon+?

I voted Setting Book, because I love having everything in one place. Similarly, the free stuff can be printed out and organized into a binder, which magazines are not as good for.

 Gazetteers "Back In The Day(tm)" were booklets about the size of a module that gave information about an area in a campaign world, kind of like a miniature setting book.  They would have a map of the area in question, information on cultures and factions as well as the general topography and places of note. Something like this would have all the information and bonus rules on Chult for example but without the adventure. Due to it's smaller over all page count, it would be cheaper than a setting book or splat book, but it would provide useful information and tools for players and DMs alike.

As a side note: The Monstrous Compendiums of old kind of worked the same way, but just expanded on the monsters of a setting or region.

I loved the Gazetteers and the Monstrous Compendium books and used to collect them. They were great, I wish they did stuff like that for 5e. I also wish there were shorter, setting agnostic modules for 5e that are actually modular like back in the day too.

Another vote for setting books. 
And I’d want them not to include stuff that’s meant to work everywhere. I don’t want to have to buy Theros just to get the piety system rules, or Ravinca for patron system. While I see that those systems are important to those settings, I’d rather have something like XGtE have those systems, then refer to them in the setting books. Or even reprint them in the setting books, and be more specific about how they’d work in each setting.

Though I guess it can be hard to decide where to draw the line. Subclasses and magic items in particular seems like they could go in a setting book, but obviously can easily be used in other settings.

I went with settings book, but I second Golaryn's idea of having both settings book and settings gazetteers, kind of like how you can buy comics in massive tomes, regular sized books, or the thin singles.

Keith Baker rather famously maintains a blog where he answers questions people have about particulars of the Eberron setting, essentially putting out gazetteer-style information on the regular.  That strikes me as an ideal balance - a large, central setting book like Rising from the Last War with all the core details, and then community engagement (where feasible) to answer questions and build out setting information organically over time.  Especially because all the blog content is entirely optional - Keith goes out of his way to mention whenever it's pertinent that just because he says something about Eberron, that doesn't mean it's Official, Canon, or Required(TM).  He loves to see what other folks do with the setting and diverge from his own views, which frankly just makes the setting all the more interesting.

Quote from Third_Sundering >>

Setting book all the way. I'd go as far as to say that the base of D&D should have no lore. At least, no setting-specific lore, like the general alignments of specific versions of the races in the game or how common each race is. 

 As someone who primarily runs homebrew campaigns, I like having kind of a basic idea of a creature's strengths, motivations, and intended place in the world. Now that we have floating stat boosts and no fixed alignment, there are fewer mechanics to indirectly inform us of these things.

Of course, I may discard that lore completely for my setting, but it does help to have it there as a conceptual anchor. And honestly, this is half of what we pay them for. There's really not that much to the mechanics of a race. Every book should have lore from professional writers because that's part of the D&D brand. Strip away too much of it and the product feels bare and simple in a way that makes you think, "This isn't that hard. I could just do it myself."

Quote from Linklite >>

The problem with dividing up the lore and the mechanics is that, really, the mechanics should flow from the settings. Orcs in a setting where they are simply bipedal beasts will have different stats to where they're just like Humans but with green skin to a setting where they're like Endgame Hulk. Orcs in Spelljammer, where they're expected to be flying and maintaining what amounts to be spaceships are going to be vastly different from the Tolkienesque Orcs that most people think of when you mention the term "Orc".

Every setting would then, logically, have to have its own bestiary and essentially break each setting off into its own game which merely shares the same base resolution mechanics. I'm not sure that's feasible.

I'm not sure that there is going going to an easy way to keep both those who homebrew most stuff and those who mostly take what's given as-is happy. 

 Precisely. The rules and lore are two sides of the same coin. By making them overly separate, you lessen both.

The value of the "flagship setting" is that it can hold the largest number of races that other settings use, and then those settings can say "it's an elf, but this time they're blue," and people don't have to buy the whole Avatar setting guide just to have elves, and the Westeros guide to get humans, and the Froot Loops guide for aarakocra, to be able to have all three in their homebrew game.

But I prefer when a setting has already put in the work to include the races it wants to include. I'm lazy. I don't want to figure out how to incorporate warforged into Westeros.

So I'm okay with putting the lore AND mechanics for races only in books that are, uh, about them. Monsters of the Multiverse seems like the worst option, frankly.

The problem with "make everything for the flagship setting, then allow other settings to eat the flagship's scraps and make whatever minor adjustments they're allowed to" is that if the flagship setting is bad, it drags everything else down.  And there's distinct arguments to be made that 5e's flagship version of the Forgotten Realms is a bad setting.  Or at least excuted shockingly poorly by the standards of a Big Game team.  There's virtually no information of any real use available fot the supposed 'flagship' setting of 5e, and given fifty years of convoluted, inconsistently documented, self-contradictory back lore for the Forgotten Realms, the 'flagship' setting is essentially impenetrable to anyone that hasn't followed the setting for decades already.  New players don't really play in "The Forgotten Realms"; they play in Generic Fantasy Tropeland with occasional tie-ins to FR names because none of the existing FR books do any reasonable job of telling people how the Realms work.  Not the way Rising/Exploring do for Eberron, or Wildemount does for (part of) Exandria.

If you want to build your entire game around a single core flagship setting that everyone is expected to use, you need to make sure people want to play in that setting.  5e has not, at all, done that for the Forgotten Realms.  At least, not in my view.

Having the lore book is extremely useful as a base.

That said, the published adventures should include an addendum for fitting that adventure into another setting or an original setting with less work for the homebrew DM.

Give the alternate gods that would be comparable with the setting. Give the characteristics of the organizations/factions as well as alternate factions in other settings. What faction would the Harper's be in Grayhawk, or Eberron or Spelljammer? How different would the adventure RotFM change in Eberron? Where would it be likely to occur? Where would a Spelljammer land in Grehawk? What would they find of interest there?

Give the homebrew DM some jumping off points for there own material. Not just a hallway that says <insert other room/adventure here>. It would make those setting books more usable and encourage creativity.

Yes, I know that a decent DM can and has made these changes to fit things into a setting of their choosing. But wouldn't it be nice if the DM had just that little less work to do?

Quote from scatterbraind >>

Quote from Third_Sundering >>

Setting book all the way. I'd go as far as to say that the base of D&D should have no lore. At least, no setting-specific lore, like the general alignments of specific versions of the races in the game or how common each race is. 

 As someone who primarily runs homebrew campaigns, I like having kind of a basic idea of a creature's strengths, motivations, and intended place in the world. Now that we have floating stat boosts and no fixed alignment, there are fewer mechanics to indirectly inform us of these things.

Of course, I may discard that lore completely for my setting, but it does help to have it there as a conceptual anchor. And honestly, this is half of what we pay them for. There's really not that much to the mechanics of a race. Every book should have lore from professional writers because that's part of the D&D brand. Strip away too much of it and the product feels bare and simple in a way that makes you think, "This isn't that hard. I could just do it myself."

Okay . . . but that's precisely what Monsters of the Multiverse did. It still has lore for the races and monsters in the book. About as much as the Monster Manual had for its monsters, and just enough lore for the individual races to give you an idea on how they would work in different settings. 

Then, you can cross-reference the explanation for Goblins in MotM with their lore in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount in order to get a better feeling of how they work specifically in that setting. That is exactly how it should be. It shouldn't be like Volo's Guide to Monsters where it goes in-depth to how Goblinoids work in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, making the assumption that they're evil in the base lore, which is then contradicted by Eberron or Exandria's lore . . . it should be barely any lore in the core of the game that then gets more in-depth depending on what setting book you buy. 

And, IMO, the lore should make you think "this isn't that hard, I can do it myself", because that encourages homebrewing your own. Which, IMO, is a good thing.