D&D General WotC: Novels & Non-5E Lore Are Officially Not Canon

At a media press briefing last week, WotC's Jeremey Crawford clarified what is and is not canon for D&D.

"For many years, we in the Dungeons & Dragons RPG studio have considered things like D&D novels, D&D video games, D&D comic books, as wonderful expressions of D&D storytelling and D&D lore, but they are not canonical for the D&D roleplaying game."

"If you’re looking for what’s official in the D&D roleplaying game, it’s what appears in the products for the roleplaying game. Basically, our stance is that if it has not appeared in a book since 2014, we don’t consider it canonical for the games."

2014 is the year that D&D 5th Edition launched.

He goes on to say that WotC takes inspiration from past lore and sometimes adds them into official lore.

Over the past five decades of D&D, there have been hundreds of novels, more than five editions of the game, about a hundred video games, and various other items such as comic books, and more. None of this is canon. Crawford explains that this is because they "don’t want DMs to feel that in order to run the game, they need to read a certain set of novels."

He cites the Dragonlance adventures, specifically.

 

[Remathilis]

This is spellplague 2.0, but instead of visibly nuking the present, they invisible nuke the past and the works of authors 10 times more talented then they are.

 

[Parmandur]

Is that a thing? I have never seen anyone express the opinion that any D&D video game is canon, even when they were actually popular.

It is: I have seen people assert that there us a metaplot in 5E, because Baldur's Gate 3 builds off of elements from the Adventure, and one possible set of events from the end. They specifically feel the need to call out video games as non-canon in this event.

 

[Scribe]

Bottom line, fans of the novels and past products are still free to use that material, they just can't rely on their encyclopedic knowledge of non-player-character knowledge to dictate the game world.

That's not the problem.

Going by what's on the first post, my issue is with them openly stating anything prior to 5e is not canon.

That's it.

Each table will do it's own thing.
Each game changes the setting at that table.
That's how it's supposed to work.

There is another stream however, where the novels 'happened' and the story existed. Where those characters exist and continue to exist with a history we can all share and recognize as having happened. Because it was canon.

Now? It's not.

 

[Greg K]

To be respectful of the Eric's Grandma rule, I could not care less what Crawford or anyone else at WOTC considers canon with regards to settings that began with TSR as nothing created by Crawford or WOTC is canon to me with regards to those settings. That stated, I never considered D&D novels*, comics, or video games canon. Then again,I never considered much of TSR AD&D 2e canon either (the exceptions being the first Dark Sun Boxed set (and the Dark Sun Dragon articles by Timothy Brown), Ravenloft Realms of Terror boxed set, The Known World Gazeteers, and anything by Jeff Grubb for Al Qadim.
* I consider the Hickman and Weiss novels and certain early short stories canon for Dragonlance, but I don't play Dragonlance. If I were to play Dragonlance, I would ignore the adventures and begin either after Goldmoon finds the disc or after the War of the lance.

 

[Echohawk]

Well, that's a relief. Now I can finally stop worrying about who had to muck out the cupboard where Lord Soth kept his pet tarrasque in DL16: World of Krynn. While that was still canonical, I was having trouble sleeping at night.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But it happened. It was part of the story (if bond had a meta plot, I don't know)

James Bond always has a soft reset between actors, which is why @Mercurius referenced those movies. The only element of canon that was ever brought forward into future actors' runs was Bond's wife being killed in the one and only George Lazenby film, but I don't think that's been referenced for several actors now.

The Sean Connery movies had one continuity, plus the out of continuity Never Say Never Again.

Lazenby had only one film.

Roger Moore had one continuity, which acknowledged the death of Bond's wife.

Each of the actors since has had their own continuities. Bond, M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix, MI-6, SPECTRE, SMERSH and all the rest have changed between actors and the Bond fandom -- larger than the D&D fandom to this day, I suspect -- has been more or less fine with this.

 

[Burnside]

Good.

 

[jayoungr]

The whole idea of "canon" in this context baffles me anyway. Unless you're talking about organized play, I don't see how it's even a relevant concept.

ETA: Okay, I guess if you mean "do the published adventures conflict with the novels," I can see it.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

It is: I have seen people assert that there us a metaplot in 5E, because Baldur's Gate 3 builds off of elements from the Adventure, and one possible set of events from the end. They specifically feel the need to call out video games as non-canon in this event.

Then why mention the novels, the very things that made FR popular?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not trying to yuck anyone's yum, but canon-enshrining is a gatekeeping tactic that has a toxic history in fandom.

Indeed, pop quizzes to test whether someone was a "true fan" were a big part of the sexist backlash in the "fake gamer girl" era.

I've been playing since 1979, longer than most folks on this board or D&D gamers have been alive. You all count as "true fans" in my eyes, even if you talk smack about gnomes.