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.

 

[MGibster]

First, why not? Sounds like a cool concept.

It doesn't sound like a cool concept if I want to play Star Wars.

Second, would you be interested in playing if you had a chance to fight Vader, but the DM said you were forbidden from killing him and if you beat him (which you shouldn't) he was always going to escape?

Yeah. Just like I was interested in watching Kanan Jarrus and Ezra Bridger fight Darth Vader in Rebels knowing they weren't going to kill Vader.

Personally? If I knew that I was never allowed to defeat one of the most iconic villains... It'd really destroy the fun for me. But doing so would ruin the canon.

And that's totally cool. Different strokes and all that.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well, I started reading Harry Potter when the first book came out. So, no, there was no "canon" appeal whatsoever. Same as all the millions like me who made Harry Potter an absolute phenomenon long before the series had anything like a "world" or canon. And, I read LotR because it was a really good book. The canon parts of it? Could not care less. I've read LotR several times and not once have I ever read the appendices or the songs. Never cared.

Will people gate keep a different way? Possibly. But, instead of worrying about potential problems that aren't a problem right now, I'd rather point to the incredibly toxic cesspool that "fandom" turns into as soon as canon gets invoked. When every single change is something to be guarded against and resisted, not because these are bad ideas or whatnot, but, just because they're different ideas from what that "fan culture" has decided is the "true setting" of the fiction.

Having watched the fandoms of pretty much every single property that I grew up loving turn into toxic wastelands of constant sniping and aggression, I have no love at all for anything that smacks of "canon". Anyone that has the authority to come along and sweep canon into the dustbin is a hero as far as I'm concerned.

I want to add to this that the insistence on "canon" in terms of literature acts as a terrible and overhwelming weight on a lot of fanfiction writing.

Until a year or so ago, I thought fanfics were just... the worst. I'd heard that they were bad, generally just self-inserts, "Sues and Stus" and shipping.

Then I found sites that had Fanfictions in them... and they were phenomenal. Exploring concepts the original work never touched upon, or offering a different take that highlighted a different message. The fact that the medium is mocked is a true tragedy I've come to realize. Especially when you start zooming out and realizing that things like "Dante's Divine Comedy" could be described as a Fanfiction. Or Wicked. Or dozens of other incredibly good and successful properties.

Lots of bad ones too, I won't deny it, but the good can be REALLY good, and it is ignored and dismissed just because it isn't the original.

 

[MGibster]

Fans are awfully conveniently forgetful about what is and is not canon. After all, anthropomorphic rabbits are canon in Star Wars. The Star Wars Christmas Special is canon in Star Wars. But that sort of stuff gets rather conveniently forgotten whenever we talk about canon.

I remember the rabbit from the old Marvel comics of the 1980s but I don't know if that counts as EU that was expunged. As far as the Star Wars Christmas Special goes, most of us haven't seen it. I honestly tried watching it for the first time a few years back and I just couldn't get through it. It was that bad.

 

[Hussar]

But the most important part is having to constantly post that their data cutoff was self-admittedly arbitrary and can be expected to insert plenty of bias, despite so many people trying to claim it wasn’t.

Fair enough. Although, not cool telling me that I am deliberately misleading people for misremembering a 30 year old point. And, my point still stands, the longer someone games, the more their spending goes down. Yes, the totals go up, but that's to be expected. The point is, cutting things off at 35 for a MARKETING survey where you discover that the older a gamer is, the less they spend, kinda justifies the cut off.

And, since you seem to keep on claiming that spending only increases with age:

shared about purchasing habits showed each age cohort's purchasing increasing substantially,

that's the issue I was taking since it's directly contradicted by what the survey results say. The total purchases would increase, of course - if I pay X for 5 years and Y for 5 years, I'm going to spend more than if I only payed X for 5 years. However, the purchasing habits of each age does not increase, it decreases.

 

[JEB]

Declaring them "Noncanonical" makes 0 impact on your games or ability to read and enjoy those works.

A number of people in this thread have expressed that having the works they grew up on deemed "not true" does have an impact on them, and their ability to read and enjoy those works. You can decide that it doesn't matter, or they're liars, or whatever; but an impact is being had.

2) In a -home- game, I can often shut people down with "This is my game." But in a public game using Adventurer's League or whatever where it's the "Official" story, it's not my material to defend. Especially if I don't know the former books as well as the person who wants to argue about whether Thayan Enclaves were ever allowed in Waterdeep, just as an example.

In Adventurers' League, are you officially bound by lore outside of the module? If so, I suppose that would be a problem. If not - assuming "it's not canon in this game" wasn't enough - couldn't DMs just say "this is what the module says - it's canon for this module"?

(On that note, that seems like a fair strategy if any 5E-exclusive lore arguments come up. And they surely will.)

3) There's still lore, for sure. But it's much easier to manage 7 years of around 3-5 books and maybe 2 videogames for a setting is vastly better than the entire back catalog of the Realms for the past 4 decades. TSR wound up shutting down because they produced WAY TOO MUCH content too quickly.

Even easier than that, actually - none of the books or games are canon. (Ironically, this means someone can have a reverse-canon argument - reference Baldur's Gate III and they can now say "but that's not part of 5E lore"...)

Out of curiosity, if seven years is manageable, at what point would the lore become too unwieldy for your preferences?

As to the last part... to be fair I've always had that power and the confidence to do it. Younger DMs getting bullied by Grognards who have 40 years of inscrutably dense lore they absorbed one book at a time over decades... particularly ones who dislike confrontation?

They could use the backup from WotC in their corner.

Again, I doubt this policy will do anything to stop bullies. They'll still use the lore as a bludgeon, be it 40 years or 7 years or one book or "but earlier in the game you said..." The problem is bullies, not canon. And it's not fair to punish nice folks who liked canon for what bullies did with it.

 

[Faolyn]

This is all possible, because a DM could already reject elements of canon regardless of this WotC policy shift—but the Spellplague is still canon, since it’s discussed in 5e RPG supplements…

My mind just sort of blips right over FR lore. Is it something I could use in my own settings? No? Blip, it's gone. I basically remember monsters and gods from that setting, because I tried to do a Masks of God-style thing with all the various D&D gods. Then I gave up when I realized I had no actual reason to be doing it.

 

[Faolyn]

The Rebel Alliance struggling against the Empire isn't canon? If I were to show up for a game of Star Wars and the GM says, "Oh, by the way, in my version Luke died attacking the first Death Star, Vader killed the Emperor and rules the galaxy, and Darth Hermana (Princess Leia) is Vader's apprentice now" I wouldn't be interested in playing.

That sounds like a potentially really cool AU, to be honest.

 

[Chaosmancer]

While settings can change and evolve (especially ones that have been around a while), this statement from Crawford--and WotC at large--ignores decades of established lore, and is basically their way of handwaving it all away. I'm not saying they have to adhere to every single canon thing that ever was, but providing an explanation for a change in a setting is better than just saying "it's no longer canon" imho. I know, I know canon is a hot button issue, and there are clearly debates after debates about what canon is, its merits, etc, but to me, this just smacks of handwaving because they don't want to be "beholden" to established lore. It's one thing to work on problematic elements from previous editions, it's another to say, "prior to this time, nothing is canon." In other words, if it ain't 5e, we don't care. Being on some FR forums, I know many fans are shaking their heads and disappointed by the statement. Even some newer fans, as 5e is basically a lore desert, and they want to know more.

Sure, there are easter eggs and nods to older characters or things (and that the older stuff can be inspirational), but if they're doing that, then with this statement, they're also implying these easter eggs aren't canon. I have many thoughts about this, but I'll stop here. And I'll admit it's still early to tell what this entails, but I'm wary at this point.

See... I'd be more willing to believe you if it wasn't for two things.

The Time of Troubles
The Spell Plague.

Both are consistently mentioned as horrendous attempts to address the lore in a wide sweeping manner, and generally hated.

In fact, I think the only major shift in Canon I have not seen utterly panned is The Sundering (and this includes me seeing discussions of the Dark Sun Prism Pentad thing, the Greyhawk Wars, the Time Wars, ect ect ect) and I think that the reason the Sundering isn't hated is because it was a single moment that reversed a lot of things hated about the Spell Plague and Time of Troubles. It was less a change and more a single use reset button.

So, actually... no, I don't think it has pretty much ever been better to address these things in-universe. Every attempt that has been made is generally met with derision.

 

[Faolyn]

While settings can change and evolve (especially ones that have been around a while), this statement from Crawford--and WotC at large--ignores decades of established lore, and is basically their way of handwaving it all away. I'm not saying they have to adhere to every single canon thing that ever was, but providing an explanation for a change in a setting is better than just saying "it's no longer canon" imho.

If they come up with a reason why something is no longer canon, then they're going to make it an even more convoluted mess than it already is, and most likely everyone would hate whatever reason they used to do so. Ao decided to meddle? Time travel? Someone went and mass-murdered/brainwashed/removed from the timestream all the people of X culture/faction/guild/city/religion, leaving nothing behind? Toril and Oerth crashed into each other, forming a super-fantasy-world? Ed Greenwood fell asleep while Elminster was in his kitchen prattling on about something, and his dreams created a new universe?

Sometimes it's a lot easier just to wipe the slate clean.

 

[Hussar]

So, actually... no, I don't think it has pretty much ever been better to address these things in-universe. Every attempt that has been made is generally met with derision.

Well, realistically, it has to be met with derision and resisted.

If canon has value, in and of itself, then any change to that canon must be a negative. You cannot ever have a positive canon change. This is why you hear people talk about "additive canon" being fine because it never changes what came before, only builds upon. But, anything which changes established canon has to be bad by definition because if you allow canon to be changed, then that means that established canon has a variable value. Some established canon is good because it's accepted and not changed, while some canon has less value because it can be changed.

As soon as you allow for that, then canon has not objective value at all. It's only value is in whether or not it can justify itself in the face of a new idea. If a new idea is panned, then the established canon is good. If the new idea is accepted, then the established canon cannot be as good as the new canon.

And people REALLY resist the notion that canon has no intrinsic value.