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.

 

[Scribe]

I think there is a silver lining. The novels not being canon probably opens up more avenues than it closes for the authros to pursue. Using Eberron for an example, not being canon made them able to go places they wouldn't be able (because they would answer questions/resolve plots from the setting)

Maybe, but if it's not developing the shared lore (because not canon) do I have any interest in checking it out?

Not really.

Having slept on it, I still find this declaration lessens my experience, or engagement with a part of the hobby.

It's a loss, for zero gain.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yeah, if this somehow freed up authors to publish more FR novels, I'd at least have a silver lining.

It certainly should open it up for them to publish more easily with less to worry about from continuity cops of the 58 other books in the setting.

 

[Umbran]

I'd say stick to novels, if you want to know "how the story ends". And hope the author isn't GRRM, Scott Lynch, or Pat Rothfuss - OH YEAH I WENT THERE!!!! Still bitter!

Thorn of Emberlain's manuscript did get completed, as I understand it.

 

[jayoungr]

You're trying to make it all about the individual, when the discussion is specifically intended to be about the market.

Aren't you talking about the choices available to consumers?

The consumer who wants brand-new settings that are not the "boring-ass" ones produced by WotC has many, many choices. They just have to be willing to buy something that doesn't have the WotC logo on it. I don't see how that's a problem.

And the "uniqueness" point being "enhanced" because people can't use Illithids or the like is laughable, and you are well aware that's shenanigans on your own part there lol.

I'm entirely serious. Illithids are a known thing. Not being able to use them means you have to come up with something else. Either you lightly file off the serial numbers--in which case, the result is basically indistinguishable from what you'd have gotten if you had just used illithids--or you stretch your imagination and invent a new and different monster to fill the niche. Both approaches can yield perfectly fine results; in neither case (IMO) is the product actively worse just because the author didn't use the word illithid.

 

[Dausuul]

FIZBAN'S TREASURY OF DRAGONS doesn't add new content or value to the dragon books I own, it just replaces the dragon books I own and will in turn be replaced by the 6th Ed dragon book

Well... yes. Yes, that is how it works. Fizban's Treasury of Dragons replaces the 4E Draconomicons, which replaced the 3E Draconomicon, which replaced the 2E Draconomicon. Each edition* gets a dragon book, and they all tread pretty much the same ground, and they all start off assuming you know nothing about the lore of previous editions, because most buyers don't.

Whether the old books are "canonical" or not is irrelevant here. Suppose they adopted a policy that everything in the old editions was canonical: Lore-wise, you still wouldn't get any "new content or value" in FToD. You'd just get the same dragon lore you already have. The old lore warmed over, or new lore that overwrites the old: Those are the options on offer.

Frankly, I can't imagine how Wizards could establish a consistent canon encompassing D&D's history. 4E nuked the entire cosmos to smoking rubble and started over from scratch. How could you possibly treat that as fully canonical, and simultaneously treat 2E's vast array of setting material as also fully canonical? And if your answer is "Oh, 4E doesn't count"--well, then, you're just complaining because Wizards isn't catering to your preferred canon.

*Except 1E and BD&D, presumably because they hadn't yet figured out that you can make a bunch of money with a dragon book.

 

[jdrakeh]

I think the potential upside to this is that DMs won't be expected to absorb 30+ years of lore - scattered across long OOP RPG products, novels, and video games - and slavishly adhere to it when running D&D. And, yes, there are people who expect this. This expectation is exactly why, sometime in the late 90s, I started restricting most of my campaigns in official settings to the information provided in the original setting guides/box sets only (e.g. FR grey box campaign setting, Greyhawk folio, etc), with anything else to be added at my own discretion as DM.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe, but if it's not developing the shared lore (because not canon) do I have any interest in checking it out?

Not really.

Having slept on it, I still find this declaration lessens my experience, or engagement with a part of the hobby.

It's a loss, for zero gain.

It's a huge gain for WotC.

How do you not see that? How do you possibly not see that? For you it be a loss, but that's not who they're serving here. For WotC, it means they don't have to carefully track everything that happens in novels and media, which they want to make a lot more of, note, and treat it all as canon. This is huge. Companies like GW and Disney's Star Wars division literally have to employ full-time staff to track this kind of thing, and WotC wants to do more of it, which means it would become significantly more onerous.

It's a bi-directional benefit too, because it means people making those media need less approval by WotC. With Star Wars, for example, which does follow strict canon and where virtually everything is canon (post EU clearout), or where there are strict rules about what is canon, anyone making, say, a Star Wars videogame needs to do two things:

1) Keep Disney in the loop, on a literally day-to-day basis about the projected plot, characters and incidents of their video game. This isn't theoretical, this is what they actually have to do.

2) Ensure none of this stuff is a misuse of, or harm to the IP beyond that (often involving trade dress, not "re-envisioning" stuff, and so on). This is usually non day-to-day and is lower stress.

For example, the people who made Fallen Order weren't even sure if they could use a jedi for about 50% of the game's development. Like literally Disney wouldn't decide. They had to basically run two designs - one where the lead was a Jedi, for real, and one where he was from another, made-up, force tradition (which, hilariously, Disney thought was much smaller deal).

With D&D, WotC want more novels, more videogames, they want TV shows, they want movies. Doing all that, whilst keeping it all canon, is nightmarish, and it's nightmarish for both sides. If it's not necessarily canon (which can always become canon), you can drop 1 entirely and just have 2, which is a much lower burden.

That's just one major aspect to the gain, too, there are others. So it's only a loss to you, not to WotC.

EDIT - As an aside, even back in the 1990s, I did NOT like it that novels were treated as canon in the FR. Why? Because a lot of the novels where ghastly, featured awful characters, and made horrible stupid changes to the FR (not even talking about Ed himself here, just other authors). Which all the future material then typically (if inconsistently) treated as canon. Especially as there were so many godawful characters. Volo was bad enough and he wasn't a novel character (AFAIK). I kind of enjoyed how Baldur's Gate 3 has treated him though, as just as bald-faced liar.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Aren't you talking about the choices available to consumers?

The consumer who wants brand-new settings that are not the "boring-ass" ones produced by WotC has many, many choices. They just have to be willing to buy something that doesn't have the WotC logo on it. I don't see how that's a problem.

Consumers only have the choices they know about and trust. That you're pretending this isn't a thing is damn silly, frankly.

I'm entirely serious. Illithids are a known thing. Not being able to use them means you have to come up with something else. Either you lightly file off the serial numbers--in which case, the result is basically indistinguishable from what you'd have gotten if you had just used illithids--or you stretch your imagination and invent a new and different monster to fill the niche.

Uh-huh, and because it only applies to certain select D&D elements, it doesn't actually enhance things in practice, in practice, it means settings (including some of the specific ones you've mentioned) have weird holes in them, weirdly missing things, and instead tend to focus on the same things as each other, things which are allowed.

So it actually seems to have the opposite effect, and not an effect you listed - people skip that thing entirely, and focus on the same, smaller number of similar things.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Thorn of Emberlain's manuscript did get completed, as I understand it.

That's something!

I do always feel bad putting Scott in the same boat given what he's had to deal with, but there was this moment back in like, 2007, when all three were like, super-hot, and I bought Lies in part because it had GRRM saying how good it was on the back! And even in like 2012 or something, he and Rothfuss did a book signing together in London, and there was a whole bunch of us who went to it (and didn't get in because the queue was so long!), so they're all sort of inextricably linked in my mind lol.

 

[Umbran]

It's a loss, for zero gain.

For you, we can only accept that.

But, they don't make their decisions for you, in particular. At best, they make them for the health of their properties.

Much of the canon is no longer easily accessible - it exists in decades-old novels and other publications that they'd need to put into wide distribution and have the new audience pick up before they could fully engage with new material that furthered that canon.