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.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The simple solution is to use the rules from Tasha's along with the Orcs, mountain Orcs get bumps to strength and con, Grey Orcs get a bump to Wisdom and Strength done.

How is that a solution to the problem? The problem isn't stats, the problem is a DM suddenly finding out that if they want to play "the right way" then all of the lore for orcs presented as "orc lore" in Volo's doesn't apply to any of the orcs featured in the APs.

They are essentially being told "you have no lore for this iconic monster, or you need to go to an area of the map we have never made adventures for"

If you are a long-time DM or player, this isn't an issue for you. You either have the lorebooks and knew this "fact" or you have things to run in those other areas. But what do you propose a new DM does with this knowledge?

It was largely a wall of text, I skipped lightly.

That would explain why you so badly missed the point. It had absolutely nothing to do with stats.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I see it the other way around. D&D has always operated on a nebulous quasi-canon, where things are generally true until something comes along and says otherwise. This works great since people can take it or leave it from one edition to the next.

But declaring a wiiiide swath of material to not be canon takes intentional effort to exclude and create boundaries.

Gatekeeping behavior is the real concern. So let's work on that, and not just take away the watercooler where gatekeepers sometimes hang out.

See, but I think that they are still doing the same thing. Anything published before 2014 might still be canon. For example, in FR we know that the war between Dragons and Giants is still canon, because Storm King's Thunder references that lore.

All they are doing is putting out the notice that they may not use the current canon and may change it. Which, as you said, they already did. If people want to take the Days of Thunder or the Creator Races and use them? Go ahead, it might be canon. But, if WoTC publishes something that contradicts that lore, then that was a thing they don't want to be canon anymore.

Same effect, just setting the expectations.

 

[TheSword]

Why do new players need to be prioritized over long term loyal players and readers. Use a setting like Eberron instead for new players, that prefer less depth of lore.

Can I ask in what way the announcement hurts you?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Why do new players need to be prioritized over long term loyal players and readers. Use a setting like Eberron instead for new players, that prefer less depth of lore.

Then how would you ever get new players to play in the Forgotten Realms?

If the Forgotten Realms are kept as a place for "long-term" fans and Eberron (which still has massive amounts of lore if you want to dig deep) is for the new players.... then FR fades away and Eberron becomes ascendant. Which, trust me, I'd like because I think Eberron is amazing, but it seems like it wouldn't have the effect you would want.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

All they are doing is putting out the notice that they may not use the current canon and may change it. Which, as you said, they already did. If people want to take the Days of Thunder or the Creator Races and use them? Go ahead, it might be canon. But, if WoTC publishes something that contradicts that lore, then that was a thing they don't want to be canon anymore.

This calls to mind when one of the contributors to Candlekeep Mysteries was very upset that the deep-cut lore he wanted to include in the adventure about the Days of Thunder, World Serpent, batrachi, etc was removed from the published version of the adventure.

I wonder if that was because WotC internally has decided that a lot of the lore he wanted to cite is no longer canon as of now? Heck, maybe his inclusion of those lore elements in the adventure forced them to consider if they wanted them around any longer.

 

[Morley_Dotes]

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."

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"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.

Eh, doesn't surprise or affect me. For example: I have my own timeline for the Forgotten Realms going back to 2nd edition, due to the actions of my players and from the adventures I wedged into my games (modules from other worlds and my own material). Old PCs have become NPCs in future games. I do like continuity, thus my own timeline. I never felt a requirement to read the novels, nor to follow any "official" TSR/WotC/Hasbro timeline. I took the material for what it was worth. I used what I wanted and discarded the rest; that simple. Besides, my timeline for the FR is far better and cooler than anything TSR/WotC/Hasbro has had
--Good Gaming!

 

[PsyzhranV2]

This calls to mind when one of the contributors to Candlekeep Mysteries was very upset that the deep-cut lore he wanted to include in the adventure about the Days of Thunder, World Serpent, batrachi, etc was removed from the published version of the adventure.

I wonder if that was because WotC internally has decided that a lot of the lore he wanted to cite is no longer canon as of now? Heck, maybe his inclusion of those lore elements in the adventure forced them to consider if they wanted them around any longer.

He actually weighed in on that yesterday:


Text for those who can't access Twitter:

This tracks with the instructions we got when writing for Candlekeep. TBH, it's a scenario that Wizards has painted themselves into a corner with. Over 40+ plus years, lots of lore was generated, but it was seldom used/exploited to drive adventure. As a result, lore in Dnd went from being a springboard to adventure and exploration to being perceived as an albatross around the necks of DMs and creators alike. I can't count the number of times I've heard people take an adversarial stance to lore in FR, claiming "everything had history!" Usually saying that phrase immediately before or after talking about how they needed "space" to do stuff, and how the lore strangled creativity.

And here's the rub: this is what happens when you make time-live worlds with deep lore without a plan to use it. It was avoidable.

When a game generates a lot of lore, the creators have two choices. They can lean into it, leveraging the lore to their advantage, or they can keep piling lore up until the situation becomes so unwieldy that they have to hit the reset button, immediately causing fan upset and game instability. And I say instability because until they fill in the gaps, people will keep referring back to the old non-canonical lore to interpret things. We've seen it in Robotech , nuked so that only the shows and IDW comics were canon; Star Wars, with the infamous purging of the EU; and in DC, with its nonstop Crisis style events whenever the load gets too heavy. And this is basically what Wizards has said. If it's not in an official 5e book, it ain't it. But they're already stacking problems again. How? Well, there's no canonical endings to their campaigns, and they're keeping FR a "live time" world, meaning all the events in the campaign books are world canonical, and even though they have potentially world shaking implications, we don't know how they ended.

Now, some might be asking, "What about option 1?" Well, we've seen it in action before. Two good examples are the OWoD and Heavy Gear universes. Both were very lore heavy, and featured live time worlds where events in prior books were referenced and where lore drove story.

D&D's problem is that it's lore seldom drove story, it is regarded as an impediment. And that's a bad approach.

FR for example, in Faerûn alone, has multiple millennia of human and non-human habitation. What does that mean? Ruins. Dungeons. Lost Cities. Ancient Magic.

Hell, reading through the old Grand History of the Realms could pour fuel on your imagination fire for DECADES. But why didn't it?

TSR and Wizards regarded it and presented it as dry history. Maps implied modern geopolitical nation states and "filled" the world.

Non-human nations, cities, and so on were excluded in the majority from maps. Information on historical ranges of peoples were hard to come by.

The result? Well, how many people had an adventure where they went to Westgate to investigate the 7 Hills of the Lost Gods only to discover the hills were actually an arcane super weapon created by dragons before the age of Netheril that SHOT a CHUNK OUT OF ThE MOON? Hands up, I'll wait. Oh, maybe a small handful? Exactly the problem. This is the kind of thing that makes for a great campaign.

But because it functionally fell through the cracks of being mentioned off handedly, nothing.

And that's the problem. Even after they codified the history of FR in 3e, they still couldn't lean into it. And they acted like it was a burden.

Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of old lore that was objectively terrible and definitely needed retconning. 40+ years isn't going to be all gems. But the lore issue in D&D is systemic, and I think I know why. I think Wizards has trouble balancing between the open sandbox that D&D can be and was intended from the start to be, and the walled garden that a campaign setting is.

A campaign setting is a curated experience. It is a walled garden of delights where there's space to move around and develop things; within boundaries.

Whereas a sandbox is the default assumption of D&D. Where a DM and the players are creating a world as they go that meets their needs.

The issue is that Wizards favours the latter over the former, because in part they don't leverage lore to their advantage. So there's no real balance, and they're breaking down the walls of the FR garden to try to make it see more friendly to the people who like sandboxes.

Now, there was a fox that could have avoided all this. They could have opted to maintain the Points of Light setting as D&D's baseline, and then had FR as their main walled garden. The sandbox/homebrew team is already well into the practice of pillaging material from other settings for their own, so it would have been a net win. But here we are instead. Well into 5e with no campaign setting book for FR, no world map, and a company desperately trying to figure out why people are bored with FR when they only feature about 20% of one continent while leaving the rest to rot on the proverbial vine.

And just for the record? There is so much "empty/usable" space in FR it's not even funny. And literally decades worth of adventure in places that aren't Sword Coast adjacent. It's mind-blowing what's in the larger world, and equally mind-blowing is how poorly it gets used.

 

[TheSword]

This calls to mind when one of the contributors to Candlekeep Mysteries was very upset that the deep-cut lore he wanted to include in the adventure about the Days of Thunder, World Serpent, batrachi, etc was removed from the published version of the adventure.

I wonder if that was because WotC internally has decided that a lot of the lore he wanted to cite is no longer canon as of now? Heck, maybe his inclusion of those lore elements in the adventure forced them to consider if they wanted them around any longer.

I suspect it was more because WOC didn’t want to explore the deepest and most mysterious element of FR history in a 8 page side trek.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Why do new players need to be prioritized over long term loyal players and readers. Use a setting like Eberron instead for new players, that prefer less depth of lore.

New players are have a longer potential spending life time engagement. Older players are more likely to conclude at any given point in time that they have spend enough on this and simply stop.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I suspect it was more because WOC didn’t want to explore the deepest and most mysterious element of FR history in a 8 page side trek.

Or even...maybe...gasp...their deep-cut dive into barely relevant wasnt... even that good?

It's like it is impossible to be that simple: it wasnt relevant or badly written.

It must have been a deeper meaning...a preparation by WotC to wage war upon fans of FR.