D&D 5E WotC Explains 'Canon' In More Detail

Recently, WotC's Jeremy Crawford indicated that only the D&D 5th Edition books were canonical for the roleplaying game. In a new blog article, Chris Perkins goes into more detail about how that works, and why.

This boils down to a few points:

• Each edition of D&D has its own canon, as does each video game, novel series, or comic book line.
• The goal is to ensure players don't feel they have to do research of 50 years of canon in order to play.
• It's about remaining consistent.

If you’re not sure what else is canonical in fifth edition, let me give you a quick primer. Strahd von Zarovich canonically sleeps in a coffin (as vampires do), Menzoberranzan is canonically a subterranean drow city under Lolth’s sway (as it has always been), and Zariel is canonically the archduke of Avernus (at least for now). Conversely, anything that transpires during an Acquisitions Incorporated live game is not canonical in fifth edition because we treat it the same as any other home game (even when members of the D&D Studio are involved).

D&D Canon | D&D Studio Blog | Dungeons & Dragons

In this D&D Studio Blog, Chris Perkins describes the D&D Studio's position on canonicity.

dnd.wizards.com

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...

www.enworld.org

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You can't have it both ways. It very much DOES fit the themes of the setting. The setting says that faith is important. The reason they added the wall was to enforce that trope that faith is important.

Is the theme that the gods are evil? Is the theme that you worship gods not because you want to, but because of the fear of horrible punishment? Because that's what the Wall does, it makes the god evil. Simple as that. And I don't think that's the theme they wanted.

 

[pemerton]

I’m so glad that you aren’t bothered by writers saying an entire group of people who actually exist in the real world deserve horrible annihilation or being turned into a creature of evil for simply engaging in a thoughtcrime.

I'm not really persuaded that atheists are a group of people in any real sense. It's not normally a social identity.

But in any event, why do you think the writers are saying this? I thought they were writing a work of imagination. And if there is some commentary or symbolism in there, is it about "thoughtcrime" or about a lack of conviction? There are serious works of fiction that engage with the nature of conviction, or its absence - hence why I said this is the most interesting thing I've heard about the FR, as it actually suggests that the setting has something to say. (Although I accept @Crimson Longinus's point that this may be out of character for FR as a whole.)

EDIT: Isn't the FR a world in which feudal rulers are framed as LG? (As best I understand it, Cormyr at least roughly corresponds to Greyhawk's Furyondy.) So that an assassin of the monarch - ie a democratic revolutionary - would, ipso facto, be evil?

It's a fantasy world that present rather simplistic romantic tropes. The paladin stuff is one manifestation of that. As @Hussar has posted, the centrality of the gods is another: refusing to engage with the gods is like murdering a just paladin king - something not to be done.

I've got no basis for making any worthwhile sense of the paladin tropes - I can get behind Arthurian romance, or LotR, but see nothing but surface-level resemblance in what I know of FR. But as I said above, the Wall of the Faithless at least seems to me to make sense as a commentary, within the context of the fantasy tropes, upon the importance of conviction.

 

[pemerton]

Is the theme that the gods are evil? Is the theme that you worship gods not because you want to, but because of the fear of horrible punishment? Because that's what the Wall does, it makes the god evil. Simple as that. And I don't think that's the theme they wanted.

In the fiction who created the Wall? The gods? Or was it already there?

We don't need to delve too deeply into the Euthyphro to think that perhaps the good of conviction - if it is being held up as a good - might be understood as arising independently of, and prior to, the gods.

 

[Ibrandul]

In the fiction who created the Wall? The gods? Or was it already there?

An evil god of the dead, Myrkul, created it. But then he was replaced by Kelemvor, who considered destroying the wall and was instructed explicitly by the Overgod, Ao, to retain it. FR isn’t really a setting where you can say “the gods are all naughty words”—the gods don’t all behave the same way, there are alliances and enmities among them, they’re quite different from one another, etc., so it’s difficult to say “the gods are all (any specific quality)”—but many of them definitely are naughty words. And I would argue that Ao is one of those naughty word gods.

I’m quite fond of the Wall. It gave me my best character ever: a cleric of Kelemvor who joined that faith after his beloved wife died an atheist. (She professed to be a conspiracy theorist who believed that priests and clerics were secretly wizards who had hoodwinked the population.) After she died, my character believed in the doctrine of the Wall and thought his late wife would be tortured in it for eternity because no other god would claim her. Since the only souls who normally end up dwelling in Kelemvor’s domain where the Wall is located are those who are claimed as worshippers by Kelemvor, my character became a Kelemvorite cleric in order to ensure he would spend eternity in that god’s domain, in order to be near his beloved even though she would be (as Pink Floyd has it) another brick in the Wall. The notion of the Wall’s injustice never occurred to him (though it did to me).

The twist was that the wife wasn’t actually an atheist; she was secretly a servant of Asmodeus who made a show of atheism in order to dodge questions about why she never payed obeisance to any of the usual deities.

Note that none of this required the Wall to be canonically “real”; like Ed Greenwood, I feel that the setting should establish what the various churches believe but should leave the canonical truth of divine matters as unsettled as possible, apart from basic truths like “these are the gods, they are real and affect peoples’ lives in these ways.” Too much canonical certainty on divine matters makes it impossible for the gods to feel mysterious to players, which is unfortunate. (The published setting has erred on the side of too much canonical information about the gods, in my opinion.)

 

[Hussar]

Is the theme that the gods are evil? Is the theme that you worship gods not because you want to, but because of the fear of horrible punishment? Because that's what the Wall does, it makes the god evil. Simple as that. And I don't think that's the theme they wanted.

No, that's your specific interpretation of this and is not the only possible interpretation.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Atheist is a understandable faith in RL, in FR its patiently absurd flat earth type thinking with all the Hollywood style God stuff going on. FRs Gods aren't shy about throwing their weight around.

That being said of course the Wall of Faithless is evil, but that is why evil and neutral Gods end up in charge of death, to do the dirty work. Kelevmor was good, but the job's requirements stripped him of his last bit of humanity, so he's neutral. Becooming a God was one of the worst things that happened to him.

Again I seperate real life atheism from fantasy setting atheism, RL is far less flashy with miracles. Usually.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

See, here's the thing. It can't both be a Thermian argument and not. It's not that the gods are "exploiting and coercing mortals". That's an in-universe reason for an out of universe choice - to play a character that deliberately works against the setting. Now, you might not like the design decision and find the "carrot" approach better. That's fine. But, that's just a personal preference, not an actual reason to change something. IOW, it's not unjust or despotic. The out of game reason for it is to tell players, in no uncertain terms, play a religious character in this setting. Full stop.

But, no, it is not a "moral choice" to oppose the gods. You've decided that you don't like the way they've done something and then simply massaged the in-world interpretation to fit with that decision.

You can't have it both ways. It very much DOES fit the themes of the setting. The setting says that faith is important. The reason they added the wall was to enforce that trope that faith is important.

But, now we get back to the problem I have with players all the time - tell the players not to play X and they will move heaven and earth to try to play X. No dragonborn in your world? Oh, hell no, I MUST play a dragonborn now. Now wizards in this campaign? I'm going to pitch fifteen different flavors of wizard at you until you finally break down and say yes.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy here. It's a perfectly plausible, very flavorful concept that enforces setting tropes. It's not like the notion of a "slow dissolution" is totally unheard of in various real world religions. The primary arguments against it seem to boil down to, "You can't tell ME what to do."

Mom, I'm scared, a man jumped out of the TV and is shaking me down for money, he sees God told him to buy three more private jets, he told me I'm going to burn forever if I don't give him money, mom help!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That being said of course the Wall of Faithless is evil, but that is why evil and neutral Gods end up in charge of death, to do the dirty work.

I'm pretty sure that if a party included an evil PC specifically so they could do the bad stuff the good PCs didn't want to dirty their hands with, then the DM would question the "goodness" of those PCs.

 

[Shardstone]

The Wall of the Faithless is a stupid concept unless it becomes a main component of the setting, IE, heroes adventuring to break it down and free the souls of the dead from the clearly tyrannical and abusive gods.

 

[Maxperson]

Discrimination against atheists - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You do realize that virtually anything bad you can imagine in the game has been perpetrated on some group or another in real life, right? If you're going to remove anything that can be tenuously linked to any group in real life that has suffered, you can't play the game as anything other than sunshine and rainbows. No combat. No killing of any sort. No assaults. No kidnappings. No any bad stuff.

You can play that sort of boring game if you want, but a lot of us understand that superficial correlations don't actually mean anything against real life groups. It's extraordinarily rare to have a real connection like the Vistani and the real life Romani peoples.