It's 2014 cut off date and was all the rage here on Enworld when they announced it
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
If you search for "canon" and older than 2021-12-31 you get a couple more threads on it
Thank you! Very quick and useful!
I note that doesn't hard-conflict with Ed Greenwood's statement though. He's saying, as I understand it, that WotC can't decanonize the novels, contractually. Only he and WotC know if that's true, of course. But let's look at the wording of the WotC statement:
""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."
Two things of note:
1) This is broad generalization about D&D, that's being made - it's not specific to the FR.
2) There are a couple of "weasel words" (I use term without judgement), the primary one being "Basically", which is something people pretty much only say when they know there are exceptions.
I would draw a line (and I understand this is arguable) between "decanonizing" and saying stuff not necessarily canon. Decanonizing, to my understanding, would be actively changing things so certain novels/characters were no longer canon. I.e. suddenly the Time of Troubles didn't happen, or if it did, Mystra wasn't Midnight, or whatever.
WotC seems to be working around this pretty actively - 5E has a huge time-skip, which means virtually all of Ed's novels are just... irrelevant. But they're not decanonized in the sense of "that never happened". Of course it could just be that Ed is confused or whatever.