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.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Given we just had a several hundred page thread devoted to halflings, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that thread length is indicative of nothing more than the fact that game nerds like to talk.

On our last episode of “When Sealions Meet Sealions” …

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Heh, that's awesome and funny.

I've never experienced sleep paralysis, but I've definitely been in a hypnagogic state. And weirdly, to this day I get nightmares if my shoulders are cold.

So I used to* get sleep paralysis pretty often when I was a teenager, and it was pretty scary, with genuinely terrifying monsters looming over me when unable to move and feeling like I was awake but not being and so on. Then one night it's a skeleton exactly like that one, and despite having the scary sensations of sleep paralysis, I just started mentally laughing, because I couldn't take it seriously as a threat - it was just too over-the-top, no matter how cool it looked, from then onwards sleep paralysis stopped being scary just generally. So those skeletons helped me out!

* = I later worked out what caused it eventually, which was if I got really exhausted, like, mentally and physically, and just flopped into bed and laid there - if I didn't fall asleep like immediately, I almost always got sleep paralysis - but if I tried to read a book or something, even if I only got 1-2 pages before I couldn't even keep my eyes open, I didn't. It's weird, dunno if it'll help anyone else, but I mention it in case it does.

It's easy to think that the online discourse of a handful of people going forth represents a significant sample population, when it really doesn't. In my gaming groups, this hasn't even been a blip of a topic of discussion. Out in the non-forum world, you can find players even in their 30s that have no idea even who a Drizzt is, let alone what the relationship between Kas and Venca is, or the fall of Myth Drannor.

Uh, as Parmandur so humorously pointed out (see below). It may be 77 pages long but it's really a bunch of back and forth between 8 to 10 posters. And that's just among the tiny minority of players that make up ENWorld (however much I may love reading the forums here). Hardly a large group of people in contention over this event. What it says to me is that it's really only important to a very, very, very small vocal minority and isn't worth the seconds of time it would take WotC to respond.

 

[Maxperson]

Uh, as Parmandur so humorously pointed out (see below). It may be 77 pages long but it's really a bunch of back and forth between 8 to 10 posters. And that's just among the tiny minority of players that make up ENWorld (however much I may love reading the forums here). Hardly a large group of people in contention over this event. What it says to me is that it's really only important to a very, very, very small vocal minority and isn't worth the seconds of time it would take WotC to respond.

And yet they ripped alignment out of the Candle Keep book based on a vocal minority.

 

[TheSword]

And yet they ripped alignment out of the Candle Keep book based on a vocal minority.

It’s back for Fizban’s book though. Phew!

 

[Scribe]

It’s back for Fizban’s book though. Phew!

Really?! I haven't seen that.

 

[Chaosmancer]

77 pages and going strong, that alone shows you how divisive this would be, no wonder no one at WotC is willing confirm any of this.

Dude, we had a nearly 200 page long thread over halflings. And we've had multiple 50 to 70 page threads over the nature of evil. This is not a sign of how divisive the subject is.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

And yet they ripped alignment out of the Candle Keep book based on a vocal minority.

More vocal, less of a minority (in terms of numbers), and in more places. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure this site is the only place still talking about this canon thing.

 

[Northern Phoenix]

And yet they ripped alignment out of the Candle Keep book based on a vocal minority.

The "vocal minority" on Twitter are about 1000 times more influential than all the old-style forums combined. And i'm not looking to debate whether that's good or bad, I'm just saying that's the way it is.

 

[TheSword]

Really?! I haven't seen that.

“We also look at alignment. For example, chromatic dragons are typically evil, so can there ever be a good black dragon? The beauty of the word ‘typically’ is that there’s always the possibility. Each entry in this chapter starts with a table of personality traits and a table of ideals. And the final entry on the table of ideals is always something that’s dramatically outside the norm for that dragon’s alignment as we wanted to make the point that typically does mean typically, not always.”

They’re are doing it in such a way as to allow for typical alignments but making it clear that non typical alignments are acceptable if not encouraged.

 

[Maxperson]

More vocal, less of a minority (in terms of numbers), and in more places. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure this site is the only place still talking about this canon thing.

I strongly doubt that. People on sites where people go to discuss D&D, including announcements like this, will be discussing it.