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.

 

[Catulle]

So, the particular piece of lore in question? First time I'd ever heard of it in all my years as a D&D fan. Being able to dig up obscure and gross facts in the canon does not make an argument that the rest of canon has to go.

JEB... buddy... do you want us to go deeper, because we can. To the Spellfire Trilogy's heroine essentially raping her paramour while he's unconscious, to Drizzt's horrible back story, to the way the Amn and Tethyr war started, happened and finished. Also just how many gods?

 

[Catulle]

And that's flat out ignoring Elminster-pretends-to be nonsense because Ed Greenwood got the wrong memo about Zeus!

 

[Zardnaar]

Bad things happen in novels. They're novels.

And written 30 odd years ago.

Whatcha gonna do destroy call art from before 2015?

 

[Catulle]

The most offensive thing in this thread, period, is you calling other posters pedophile apologists and/or challenging folks to prove they are not. You and I are done.

I would recommend as the best defence against that, to... y'know not defend the presence of paedophiles in the game background. Which would be easy to manage. You could say it right now. I'll even provide a copy paste.

"I stand against using child sexual abuse as a feature in any game I run. While horrible, it is a theme that is likely to cause more harm than good since we as roleplayers are not trained trauma consultants."

See? Easy.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Bad things happen in novels. They're novels.

And written 30 odd years ago.

Whatcha gonna do destroy call art from before 2015?

No. Just say the old canon should be fired and people can read it but don't need to to get the details of the setting.

 

[Catulle]

Bad things happen in novels. They're novels.

And written 30 odd years ago.

Whatcha gonna do destroy call art from before 2015?

Nah, contextualise.

Unless they're the Prism Pentad; that I reserve the right to throw around a room.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nah, contextualise.

Unless they're the Prism Pentad; that I reserve the right to throw around a room.

I liked reading the PP. Fun read. Didn't like what it did to the world though.

90's metaplot.

 

[Catulle]

On the plus side, moderation is catching up wih the thread so maybe they'll do something about the apologetics rather than the mod sass

/jk

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Catulle has been banned from this thread.

A note: this particular mod goes after low-hanging fruit FIRST, especially when extremely busy. Don’t be that low-hanging fruit.

Got a problem with something you see? Report it.

 

[Steampunkette]

So... an important thing to note for those who think child-brides were common through history:

They never were. In any culture. At least not in a sexual way.

In European cultures it was fairly rare to marry young. Rare enough to be -remarked- upon when some 14 year old Prince wound up married to his 30 year old counterpart from another nation, or vice versa. These events typically involved a peace-treaty or a political maneuver against the royal family that essentially required reinforcement of right to rule through marriage to another, powerful, family.

Engagements, on the other hand, became INCREDIBLY popular among the wealthy, as it conferred many of the benefits of marriage (Social Standing, Political Force of Alliance) without separating parent from young child. Big part of why arranged marriage became huge in the late Medieval period and into the Renaissance era. It got even stronger in the Edwardian and Victorian eras, as even merchant families began engaging in the practice.

But it still wasn't something common people largely did. Because marriage was a multi-layered affair involving property rights, legal rights, religious beliefs, and so forth. Common people owned very little and had few legal rights for marriage to adjust. So for common folk marriage was almost invariably about children and religion.

Now you might be saying to yourself "But Steampunkette: What about the various cultures -outside- of Europe!?" And the answer is: Pretty much the same. In various African cultures children could be married at 13 years old, but such marriages had nothing to do with sex or child-rearing and everything to do with social cohesion. In most of Asia you waited 'til you were out of your apprentice-ship before you could qualify for marriage (Between 16 and 18 years old), and in the Americas it was roughly the same.

Did people commit child sexual abuse throughout history? Oh, absolutely, yes. Undoubtedly. But there was only ever one culture which condoned it, and only in the form of a contractual obligation between an adult man and his apprenticed student.

Rome.

And it was SOUNDLY condemned by everyone else. It was a big part of Paul's Epistles (Letters) to Rome for a reason. Even Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Paul's in the early 0s through 30s AD, spoke out against pederasty in the Empire. And Alexandria was -PART- of Rome, so it's not like he was outside of it looking in or anything.

Though in fairness, Philo's objection to pederasty was that it trained the boys to be feminine rather than any actual outrage about pedophilia, but that just gets chalked up to "Even the 'Good' people who stood up to Evil were often pretty terrible in the distant past"