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.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

OK.

Yes, of course. I mean that the Avatar Trilogy and pulling the Gods out of the heavens to justify an edition change wasn't the excuse for a soft reboot and literally removing all the assassins from the Realms or anything. And I've no idea what the excuse for changing the Great Wheel into the World Tree was.

Bye then

 

[Remathilis]

Star Wars has always had a priority approach to continuity, ever since Splinter in the Mind's Eye was totally ignored in favour of The Empire Strikes Back and the Christmas Special was ignored in favour of pretending that it never happened. Meanwhile those of us who were there 20 years ago remember that the Prequel Trilogy really didn't fit very well with the books, and George Lucas considered himself entirely unbound by anything that happened in any of the books. And then there's the Clone Wars vs The Clone Wars issues.

If you expected the Legends Continuity to be given pride of place rather than the core continuity to be based on visual media that far more people engaged with you simply weren't paying attention. Swearing at Disney for continuing in the footsteps of George Lucas is ... ironic.

And when Lucas found her made Decisions in the prequels that contradicted the OT, he changed the OT.

LukeSacredTexts.jpg

 

[jayoungr]

Is that the source of the complaint? There's nothing in the article that indicates that, and the author appears to be a journo/blogger, not a frustrated D&D setting writer.

Might be best not to make up motives for people, unless I missed some Twitter drama or something and turns out this is some ae the author has been grinding at length.

I admit I'm being a little curmudgeonly, but this is a complaint that comes up regularly on this board--every time a new adventure is released, there's loud groaning to the effect of "OMG, not the Forgotten Realms again!"--and I just don't get the idea that D&D ends with what WotC publishes. Maybe this particular author hasn't been grinding the axe, but the "fandom" at large certainly has.

I am not, by the way, suggesting that the author thinks WotC should be publishing his/her own setting rather than their existing ones. I'm just saying that anyone who wants to play in another setting has an absolute embarrassment of professional-quality options already available, so there's almost guaranteed to be one that will fit any taste. It seems like willful blindness (and more than a little entitlement) to complain because Wizards of the Coast specifically hasn't written the exact thing you want.

 

[Umbran]

You start reading novels. You enjoy say Star Wars. You want to know what happens to those characters and the universe they inhabit.

You do it over say 20 years. They have children those characters develop. You get attached to it. And then Disney pulls the legends thing. Well you were happy to take my money for 20 years F you.

So, the issue arises at the point where you imply the f-bomb.

I can understand that being told the old continuity will not be moving forward can be frustrating, but... your past patronage doesn't entitle you to future content as you want it. That sense of entitlement is what leaves you mad when they choose a different direction.

But, you didn't pay them for the future. You're assuming that creators owe you for having been a past customer. And that just isn't fair.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Is there though? White Wolf tried that super metaplot heavy approach with the first iteration of the World of Darkness, and that was kind of a disaster. If another tabletop company were to try a similar approach now, in the age of social media, I wonder what sort of different technical challenges they'd face.

(I wonder if the arguments over the launch of Chronicles of Darkness were anything like this).

The living world approach does see use and success in live service video games (whether they be MMOs, MOBAs, FPS games, etc.). Wonder what the difference is, and what percentage of players are actually invesred in the lore as opposed to just wanting new content in general.

Yeah I do think there is.

My experience is that there's a group of people who love ridiculously in-depth settings with "lore" that they can "dig into", and love knowing decades of lore and so on. Indeed, it's a trait a lot of people possess to some extent.

And some of those people are DMs, who genuinely love these "accreted" settings were you have layers of lore building on each other, and layer after layer, in ways that can be fascinating or dumb or nerdy or whatever. They're the sort of people vastly happier with a prequel in a boring-ass era than a well-done reboot or remake.

What WW did was somewhat different. They had a relatively new setting that they were trying to propel forwards with adventure-related metaplots. However they did provide ridiculously rich and in-depth setting lore, and books and books and books of it, and that was very successful - I knew loads of people who had VtM books they never used mechanically or even really in writing campaigns, just because they wanted to read the lore. And when the did try and do a reboot/remake, things did not go well for them financially, see the nWoD, which I liked some of the ideas of, and loathed others, personally. The issue with the adventure metaplot was more that they forced the pace than anything else, and much as some people complained about it, whilst they were pushing it, WW did pretty well. Only when they crashed it into the wall of the actual apocalypse and rebooted did things go truly awry (Revised didn't help though, it was a tonal (no typo) reboot on two of their most popular lines, which didn't endear them to a lot of their fans).

Fortnite, MOBAs, etc. show this sort of thing can work - and yeah it's astute of you to note the role social media plays here. I think that would have helped WW. You don't have to go as fast as WW did though. Just provide massively over-detailed settings and promise to gradually add to it. One might want to do some audience testing to see what exactly D&D fans might want from such a thing of course.

 

[Cadence]

I've never played in a pre-made setting like GH or FR or DL before, but do remember the GH updates in the old Dragon magazines.

So what did people running FR have the big edition switch cataclysms happen in game to the characters? If GH put out a history update for an area where something in play contradicted it, was it just ignored - while being implemented elsewhere? Do new class and race options (like 1e UA and all the splat books in every edition since) just appear as if they've always existed, seem new in game, or are they disallowed?

 

[jdrakeh]

I don’t understand why anyone would care.

Some people are reeeeeeeeeally invested in D&D canon (particularly FR canon, IME) to the point that it's a huge part of their identity and that any alteration of it will induce apoplectic fits. This is true of other fandoms, as well, of course.

 

[Cadence]

Sorry, but I still don't get it.

If a property I like gets rebooted or reset, my first reaction would be more curiosity than anything else. I might be a bit sad, but I've got bigger things to worry about; I'll live.

As an Avengers (and Marvel) fan since 1981, for me it's always come down to whether it feels like a love letter to what came before, a cash grab, or just pissing on it, and what the quality of the story is.

So there are a bunch of non-reboot issues I've always considered apocryphal (because it was badly written or had folks act out of character) and there are other big changes that I've been fine with.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm just saying that anyone who wants to play in another setting has an absolute embarrassment of professional-quality options already available

I mean, does it?

We've got, AFAIK, FR, Eberron, Ravenloft, Ravnica, Theros, Wildemount, right? Two of those are basically the same generic-ass setting (FR/Wildemount, soz CR fans, FR fans, feel free to throw fruit), and Ravnica/Theros are extremely specific. I wouldn't call basically five settings an "embarrassment" myself. I mean, I you can't like, sit on a throne surrounded by setting books if you've only got 5-6 setting books lol, not even if you put them on stands on velvet-tablecloth'd tables or something. And really you need that sort of thing for "Embarrassment of Riches" level of oversufficiency.

I think the author's (poorly-made and confusing) point is that it'd be nice if the FR started pushing some genuine novel settings, with the implication that they basically have a bullhorn and are standing on a car, and everyone else can barely whisper, when it comes to promoting a setting. Albeit it kind of looks like Critical Role just got on to the car with them and started shouting with their new Tal'Dorei book (which is a non-WotC product, I believe).

From what we know, WotC do have one new setting in development, but it might not make it. I certainly hope it does.

 

[Yaarel]

As an Avengers (and Marvel) fan since 1981, for me it's always come down to whether it feels like a love letter to what came before, a cash grab, or just pissing on it, and what the quality of the story is.

So there are a bunch of non-reboot issues I've always considered apocryphal (because it was badly written or had folks act out of character) and there are other big changes that I've been fine with.

Huh. Good use of the word apocryphal, especially in the context of canon.