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.

 

[Dire Bare]

Canon isn't an all-or-nothing proposition, you know. You can retcon/ignore specific bad ideas without throwing out the entire thing.

I may have missed some of your posts, or misunderstood some of your posts, but . . . haven't you been arguing that WotC's decision to sideline older canon is bad? Doesn't the statement above support their point, that they shouldn't be overly concerned with older canon?

WotC isn't throwing all canon into the wastebin, erasing it from existence, despite the histrionic claims of some posters. They are simply doing what you suggest, keeping the canon they feel still works, and ignoring the canon they feel doesn't.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Of course, this also gets into the ridiculousness of needlessly adhering to existing canon. Durnan, and all of the other mysteriously long-lived denizens of the Realms . . . should have either died at their appointed times, or the setting shouldn't have been advanced. We have a ridiculous number of Realms characters who have survived from pre-Avatar times, through the Spellplague, and to the modern Realms . . . . so stupid and immersion breaking.

Agreed.

Durnan, Mirt, Bruenor, Wulfgar, Cattie etc should all be dead.

Laeral, Elm, Drizzt could all be alive, but mostly retired.

Minsc should still be a stone statue.

 

[Dire Bare]

Minsc should still be a stone statue.

Heh, it may be somewhat hypocritical of me, but . . . that's one wild survival story that I'm totally in love with!

Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes!

To have one or two characters have some sort of magical mystery mayhap that allows them to survive over the centuries is okay. It's very much in genre. It's just the sheer number of cases that occurs in the Realms!

Minsc is the fantasy equivalent of Buck Rogers! He's even got a space creature as a treasured companion!

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Heh, it may be somewhat hypocritical of me, but . . . that's one wild survival story that I'm totally in love with!

Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes!

To have one or two characters have some sort of magical mystery mayhap that allows them to survive over the centuries is okay. It's very much in genre. It's just the sheer number of cases that occurs in the Realms!

Minsc is the fantasy equivalent of Buck Rogers! He's even got a space creature as a treasured companion!

Much agreed.

Rare occurrences are...rare...in the Realms!

I mean, c'mon, are the Bouldershoulders, Pwent and Catti-Brie the best heroes you can come up with? You need to resurrect them because you cant do better? Have a little more confidence in your writing skills, authors, please!

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

It could be simple that the writer messed up the math.

That's unfounded speculation, and even if it is true, it doesn't change the result.

 

[jdrakeh]

Whatever the production costs of the Planescape campaign setting it wasn’t the content that made it unprofitable.

I never said or even implied that the content was the issue.

 

[Dire Bare]

Much agreed.

Rare occurrences are...rare...in the Realms!

I mean, c'mon, are the Bouldershoulders, Pwent and Catti-Brie the best heroes you can come up with? You need to resurrect them because you cant do better? Have a little more confidence in your writing skills, authors, please!

I'm hoping someday to read a Salvatore Drizzt novel about how Drizzt moves on, in a healthy and positive way, after all his friends die AGAIN. Maybe he can go adventuring with his half-elf kid.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I'm hoping someday to read a Salvatore Drizzt novel about how Drizzt moves on, in a healthy and positive way, after all his friends die AGAIN. Maybe he can go adventuring with his half-elf kid.

Since the Spellplague, I usually put Elmo as a grumpy old sage in the Dales, with only a fraction of his powers still intact. Drizzt is no more adventuring, being instead a ardent politician in Waterdeep, trying to defend the rights of the small Drow enclave that followed Elistrae to the surface.

Bruenor is dead, Catti also. Gauntlgrym is still lost.

Etc

 

[JEB]

I may have missed some of your posts, or misunderstood some of your posts, but . . . haven't you been arguing that WotC's decision to sideline older canon is bad? Doesn't the statement above support their point, that they shouldn't be overly concerned with older canon?

WotC isn't throwing all canon into the wastebin, erasing it from existence, despite the histrionic claims of some posters. They are simply doing what you suggest, keeping the canon they feel still works, and ignoring the canon they feel doesn't.

There's a difference between an implied approach of "everything in older editions was true, except for these bits we don't like" and an officially stated approach of "everything is older editions is not true, except for these bits we specifically like."

And my main opposition is that the former approach accommodated folks who liked the idea of a canon since the beginning of 5E (with retcons being targeted to specific things) and folks who didn't care about canon (by making sure anything relevant is in the new books). This official statement doesn't change anything for the second group, but might make the first group feel left out. I like the idea of most D&D fans being on the same page, and this announcement just seems like yet another thing that'll drive a wedge between old and new folks.

The silliest part is that they could have had exactly the same policy, but never announced it. Canon fans would just continue to treat retcons as exceptions, like they did before, but still buy all the other stuff. The only reason I can think of (other than not thinking it through) is pre-emptive damage control ahead of some big retcon... but come on, folks will still complain, they were never going to prevent that. However, advance warning may well persuade some older fans to not even give the new stuff a try...

That all said, in the post you quoted, I'm criticizing someone insinuating that because they found one specific piece of lore that's super horrible, all lore should go, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly in favor of that gross lore. It's a ridiculous assertion, like saying we should throw out vegetarianism because bad people have been vegetarians.

 

[Catulle]

It could be simple that the writer messed up the math.

And I thought you cared about the canon...

Is it just child rapists that you're willing to flex your take on Canon regarding (do NOT look at the early Dales chronology either), or maybe other awful things like racism (eyeing you Maztica) or sexism?

Thought not.