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.

 

[Zardnaar]

Whaaaaaat the hell?

Iirc you can get married at age 12 in some parts of the states and several countries

Dire Bare: if they're 14 years old it isn't rape.

Really spicy take there, champ. Brave.

Depends what country you live in. Age of consent is 14 in some places of Europe, it's 16 here.

Not saying I agree with it but just some examples. I think you can get married from the age of 12 in some places in the states.

And older D&D kind of did incorporate some elements of non modern life.

I won't mention the ages of Game of Thrones characters in the books.

Not defending it. Where I draw the line depends on execution, setting and time period.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think referring to this version of Durnan as a "kiddie fiddler" or pederast is a bit much. It was certainly a bad idea to add to Realms lore, and it's definitely one of those artifacts we can gladly leave in the dust. But a 14-year-old isn't a kiddie, they're a teenager. And it's only relatively recent in human history that teenagers weren't of marriageable age. Not to make the Thermian Argument that this little bit of Realms lore is OK (it's not) due to the medievalesque basis for D&D style fantasy, just a little pushback on the extreme reaction.

There's definitely speculative fiction that's done a good job of looking at how immortality or effective immortality would impact relationships. (It's a popular trope in vampire fiction and also clumsily stumbled into by less-good works like Twilight).

I'm in my early 50s, and while I can find young women in their 20s attractive, I can find very little to relate to. I have a hard time imagining that effect diminishes when one starts having a triple-digit birthday.

I'm not familiar with the context, outside of what's been discussed in this thread . . . . but I'm really hoping that Durnan's 14-year-old wife is a math error rather than intentional. Please, I'm really hoping this is the case. If 500 year old Durnan married an adult woman (by today's standards) . . . I'm totally cool with that idea, despite the "vast age difference".

Yeah, this smacks of someone making a math error and not checking their canon bible or the wikis on the web.

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.

This is the real issue, of course. It's inane that every single marquee character and characters who are not at all marquee, like a freaking bartender, can't ever be replaced in almost 40 years of the setting being in print. I am confident that someone could come up with a more interesting bartender than Durnan and a more interesting bar than "hey, this one has a giant hole in the floor leading to monsters." (For one thing, that place must smell terribly, not to mention being a huge OSHA nightmare.)

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Iirc you can get married at age 12 in some parts of the states and several countries

Depends what country you live in. Age of consent is 14 in some places of Europe, it's 16 here.

Not saying I agree with it but just some examples. I think you can get married from the age of 12 in some places in the states.

And older D&D kind of did incorporate some elements of non modern life.

I won't mention the ages of Game of Thrones characters in the books.

Just because it happened in the past and it was normal back then doesn't mean it was right. You don't have to put it in your game worlds just because it happened in real life.

And before the cries of "simulationism" ring out... you're making and playing in a fantasy world. This is all made up. You can have David Bowie clones riding on pink fluffy unicorns jousting with baguettes as a completely normal thing in your world if you want. To the Home for Infinite Losers with simulationism if it means reenacting the uglier parts of human history without criticizing them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

Pratchett's rule about a million-to-one-odds always coming true seems like it could have been written for the Realms.

 

[Catulle]

Iirc you can get married at age 12 in some parts of the states and several countries

Depends what country you live in. Age of consent is 14 in some places of Europe, it's 16 here.

Not saying I agree with it but just some examples. I think you can get married from the age of 12 in some places in the states.

And older D&D kind of did incorporate some elements of non modern life.

I won't mention the ages of Game of Thrones characters in the books.

Genereally speaking, I avoid the hell out of sexual relationships with people who's brains haven't finished forming yet...

Which is not to say that I held that stance before my brain had finished forming.

But that wouldn't be my fault (assuming a shift in the dynamics); it would be my abusers.

 

[Zardnaar]

Just because it happened in the past and it was normal back then doesn't mean it was right. You don't have to put it in your game worlds just because it happened in real life.

And before the cries of "simulationism" ring out... you're making and playing in a fantasy world. This is all made up. You can have David Bowie clones riding on pink fluffy unicorns jousting with baguettes as a completely normal thing in your world if you want. To the Home for Infinite Losers with simulationism if it means reenacting the uglier parts of human history without criticizing them.

As I said it for me it depends on the novel and how it's done.

Age of consent in vaguely normal countries seems to vary between 14-18 as well.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

Honestly, this is a better plot than any D&D novel and would forever shut up people who say that D&D novels are inherently juvenile. I would read the hell out of a book about love and loss and life and death told through the eyes of an elf hero watching generations of his companions rise and fall.

 

[Zardnaar]

Genereally speaking, I avoid the hell out of sexual relationships with people who's brains haven't finished forming yet...

Which is not to say that I held that stance before my brain had finished forming.

So do I even when I was young and stupid. I grew up reading a lot of books with a lot worse things in them usually history books.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

As I said it for me it depends on the novel and how it's done.

Age of consent in vaguely normal countries seems to vary between 14-18 as well.

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. The age of consent being legally that low is one of those things, because the age of consent being that low just opens the door for people to abuse and exploit children who aren't ready for those kinds of relationships and then get away with it because they can argue it's legal on a technicality. And there are people in those countries who are fighting to change that. For example, I believe raising the age of consent is currently one of the priorities of the feminist movement in Japan, where the national age of consent is as low as 13 (though individual prefectures can and have set it higher).

 

[Catulle]

So do I even when I was young and stupid. I grew up reading a lot of books with a lot worse things in them usually history books.

Oh and we've all been young and stupid, for sure