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

 

[LazarusKane]

Actually, heres the funny thing. I just reread the gold dragon entry. Here it is, as a refresher. I can’t link to the page on metallic dragons in general since that would involve money, but I’m sure you have the MM and can read it. Especially the Persistence of Memory section.

So go on, read them, then kindly point out how gold dragons are, as a species, lawful good. Lawful good among other dragons, maybe, but kind patronizing jerks to humans.

So to my eyes, if you adhere to the given alignment in the statblock, in many cases you do so by ignoring the lore. And if you go by the lore, then there's a good chance you're ignoring the given statblock. But if you decide the individual creature's alignment, then it meshes perfectly with how you want that creature to work within your game.

Sorry, English isn't my first language and although I usually have no problems with it I don't have a clue what you want to say - and I think it's bad form to write "read section A to you see why you're wrong" instead of writing "because X and Y you are wrong". Probably I am wrong but I don't know why - please explain.

If you're right and I did ignore the lore of Gold Dragons: The dragon was an example, please pick some other "monster" where the alignment suits the lore. The point is: Alignment for a individual person is individual (of course), declaring a default alignment for a group allows persons/monsters to be way beyond the expectation of the players. It's a valuable tool for storytelling.
In real life (with the "neutral good" humans) we are shocked by murders and other crimes because it isn't the norm. Our society rewards "good behavior" and "following the rules", most of the people do it (more or less - to a certain point) and we expect it - so (IMHO to a lesser degree) extremely alturistic or antisocial egoistic behavior are the "Hey, look at this!" exception. (So in crime novels the point is not always the "How" and the "Who", it's the "Why").

PS: "Patronizing jerk" was the definition for LG in many groups with a paladin ;-).

 

[Maxperson]

So does this mean the cleric is cancelled? I mean, the gods are #### and alignment is #### so...

And any spell which influences or controls the mind, since you can draw a real world parallel to roofies and other drugs to make people more compliant or control them. So mental magic is toxic. And fire magic, since witches and other people have been horribly burned alive, so that's toxic. You can make these parallel connections regarding bad stuff in the game to real world toxic bad stuff for all of it, so it's all toxic and has to go.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Define Good and Evil within the context of the FR Cosmology.

I'm not gonna do that. Extorting goods and services (worship) on pain of horrible punishment is clearly evil in my books, even if you had outsourced the punishment for an external party.

 

[Maxperson]

I disagree. For the most part the fiction just did not care about the current game rules. There's few novels inbetween when an author tried to make the events in his novel also fit the current game rules and none of those were better for it (on the contrary).

We're not talking about novels. We're talking about the game were in the fiction a subclass suddenly sprouted new abilities. The lore of the subclass changed. It's not a large change to the lore, but it is a change.

 

[Scribe]

I'm not gonna do that. Extorting goods and services (worship) on pain of horrible punishment is clearly evil in my books, even if you had outsourced the punishment for an external party.

That isnt what the wall does.

Tempus doesnt say 'worship me or you will be stuck in a wall.' None of them do really. Its above the gods heads, its not their choice to make.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That isnt what the wall does.

Tempus doesnt say 'worship me or you will be stuck in a wall.' None of them do really. Its above the gods heads, its not their choice to make.

They're participating in and benefitting from an unjust system and not attempting to change it. This is not 'good'.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Then I expect you to ask them to remove all bad stuff, since it's all "toxic."

Except that idea is just a strawman you've invented to avoid actually engaging with what the people you disagree with are actually arguing.

Also, I don't care what you "expect". I don't owe you anything.

Now, what you are aggressively ignoring is, that the Thayan necromancers killing families to fuel their undead army or whatever has literally no connection to or association with real life discrimination. Atheists and agnostics who don't practice any faith being punished in the afterlife, and the implication that this lack of faith makes them bad people who can't be trusted, does.

And no, none of the thermian arguments presented in this thread or the last few threads that became about this topic actually meangingfully counter the above. The writers chose to structure the world to include this dynamic. They didn't have to, and don't have to continue doing so. It isn't an original part of the world, it isn't necessary to support any other aspect of the world, it's just a weird little thing they didn't think through, and now enough people have told them that they dislike it that they've erased it from any 5e material.

They have no reason or need to remove "all bad stuff" from the game. Just the stuff that echoes the rhetoric, structures, or dynamics, of real world discrimination. Like the Volo's Orc rhetoric and Int penalty, Drow being both black and "default evil but with some 'good ones'", and Vistani being both clear Romani analogues and drunken thieves that are actively dangerous to "normal" folks and in league with the devil.

 

[Scribe]

They're participating in and benefitting from an unjust system and not attempting to change it. This is not 'good'.

Is it just to eat meat?

 

[Faolyn]

Because it makes sense.

Why would it need to be altered or removed, when based on a 'species' or whatever Gods are after they ascend, they depend on faith/followers to function.

I mean one would assume the gods of Good would even prefer people to worship gods of Evil, because those are potentially future converts, instead of people going off and saying 'forget you guys' which leads to their weakening, and death.

Right?

Wow, that makes it so much worse.

This wall is so terrible that the "good" gods would rather people turn to evil than get put there. And somehow, that's preferable to making faithless souls poof painlessly out of existence, reincarnating them, creating a special afterlife for them, or assigning them to afterlives that best fit the way the mortal lived while alive. Heck, why doesn't Imater adopt these faithless souls? It sounds right up his alley.

Especially when you consider that there are so few faithless that giving them a non-torturous afterlife would neither cause the gods to starve from lack of worship nor encourage people to stop worshiping the gods in any appreciable numbers.

So it's sounding more and more like Ao is a bad guy.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

We're not talking about novels. We're talking about the game were in the fiction a subclass suddenly sprouted new abilities. The lore of the subclass changed. It's not a large change to the lore, but it is a change.

What lore changed? The attack action isn't lore. The mechanics of a cantrip are not lore. What actions arerequired to do what things is not a function of lore. The Bladesinger went from having the lore that they are martial wizards of an ancient elven tradition that mix spells, weapon-based combat, and weapon-based spells, in the midst of battle, while protecting themselves with a magic that makes them more graceful and quick, to...having the lore that they are martial wizards of an ancient elven tradition that mix spells, weapon-based combat, and weapon-based spells, in the midst of battle, while protecting themselves with a magic that makes them more graceful and quick.

The lore did not change.