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

 

[Remathilis]

Two things. First, I've never considered novels canon. They aren't part of the game and go off in wild directions sometimes. I was fine with the first announcement that movies, novels, video games, etc. would not be canon. Second, I've already said in multiple posts that social issues, such as orcs, are an exception. Those are relatively rare, though.

This is beginning to sound like difference without distinction. That's almost exactly what Perkins is advocating, except for you want to start at a position of everything counts and exclude, while they are starting from all of it is non canon and then include what they want. In the end, your ending up with a hodgepodge of things that are omitted, contradicted, or changed, with the difference between picking out what you don't like vs adding what you do.

IMHO it's easier to add things I like that remove the things I don't.

 

[dave2008]

Seriously? You don't consider yourself an official source of material for your own campaign?

I'm with @Maxperson on this. If official means something it means that which comes from WotC. Now, official content has no standing at my table, and I am the authority of the content at my table, but that doesn't make my content "official." It just make my content more relevant to my table.

 

[Chaosmancer]

But…. Those are my most favorite threads. The speculation threads.
As long as we all know they are not cannon…..

I know you were being a bit tongue in cheek, but I do want to take you seriously for a moment.

I don't mind speculation threads, that's fine and can be a lot of fun. But I've seen people get lost in figuring out the "secret truth" of canon before. Where they dig and dig and basically start conspiracy theories about what the true version of events is, because there was a tweet ending in e that the author made in February. (Okay, maybe not quite that bad, but it got intense)

I just don't want people to start with the whole "there is a real canon out there, they just won't say it directly. but if you look at X, Y,Z and really pay attention and are a true fan, then you'll see it"

 

[Maxperson]

If you published your setting, you would determine what is official for it.

I run the Forgotten Realms, not my own setting.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Actually that is incorrect. The only WotC canon on Eberron is what is in the PHB, MM, & DMG. According to Crawford, no other books are canon.

This might have been covered but I think he was referring to Kanon aka Keith Baker's take on Eberron.

IF you read his blog and such there are quite a few things he does very differently from the official WoTC version, and some of it is stuff that I truly truly love. For example, I don't know if lizardfolk sharing a dream world where they all constantly share the same dreams is something that was ever brought up in WoTC books, but I am infatuated with the idea.

 

[Maxperson]

You can claim that the Spellplague, and the Time of Troubles, and the Sundering, were just "additions." And if all you care about is the abstract question of whether something is "canonical," that may be so.

But from a practical point of view, they were massive changes: Today, the Forgotten Realms look totally different from the way they did yesterday. And anyone DMing a game in the Realms has to decide whether and how to incorporate those changes. And if you choose not to incorporate them, then you're going to have big problems with the lore in any new sourcebooks.

Yes, they were indeed major changes. They were not retcons, though. The Time of Troubles still happened despite both the Sundering and the Spellplague.

This is the thing I really don't get. I can entirely understand the desire not to have to choose between "massively overhaul my ongoing campaign" and "stop using official sourcebooks." That makes sense! But if that is your complaint, it should apply equally to the Realms-shattering events of yore--and, indeed, to all the metaplot TSR was so fond of.

Yep. And that's the problem. I accept that through my choices that I have to go through and figure out which new canonical lore fits my game and which doesn't due to the Spellplague, and there's less of that than you think. An organization might have come into being because of one of those massive changes, but I can easily create another reason for it to exist. The big issue is that with this change to what canon is, they are more likely to just flat out alter things that they have already printed for 5e or even prior to 5e. I shouldn't have to go through things twice just because some designer thinks it would be cool if something happened differently.

 

[Ibrandul]

I confess I haven't read everything on this forum regarding the canon kerfluffle (between this thread and the other one we're already past one hundred pages of posts, so I looked at a lot of it but skipped some pages) so let me apologize in advance if this point has already been raised—but it seems worth pointing out that there is not and has never been a single, coherent, and unified canon for the Forgotten Realms.

Check out the page "What Is Canon?" on the Forgotten Realms wiki. What does it say? There's never been an official set of rules from TSR or WotC for determining what is canon; even the major Realms developers disagree about what should be considered canon; so the wiki has created its own policiy for determining FR canon.

That policy rests on a hierarchy of nine distinct categories of material with the higher ones able to override the lower. Foremost is "official FR sources (sourcebooks, novels, adventures, articles)" (and short stories); next is anything that comes out of Ed Greenwood's mouth or typing fingers; then core D&D sources; then any official sources for other D&D settings that refer to FR; then comics and video games; then forum posts from FR creators.

If there were really a single, unified, coherent canon for FR, no such hierarchy would be necessary; it's only necessary in order to resolve all the many, many, many contradictions between all these sources. But the truth is that this hierarchy can't even accomplish its task, because already in category one we're in trouble, since many of these materials contradict one another on various points. And this would remain so even if the hierarchy were made more granular so that each type of source had its own ranking, since (for example) there would still be many contradictions between one novel and another (and, sad to say, sometimes within a single novel).

Don't get me wrong: for the wiki, this set of rules for determining canon works well, and as the page notes, the wiki's role is partly to document the lore contradictions that can't easily be resolved rather than erase those contradictions. And the page is also clear that these rules are for determining what counts as FR canon for the wiki—an acknowledgment of the fact that even once you've hammered out as many contradictions as you can, still all you're left with is one website's version of FR canon.

My point is that, as a huge fan of FR lore and history who would be disheartened if suddenly all the new FR products made no sense whatsoever alongside one another, I'm not worried at all by these new statements. The Perkins article implies that there will continue to be discrepancies between various depictions of the Realms, and that WotC isn't going to be trying to referee resolutions of those discrepancies. And yet the Realms mostly hangs together. The contradictions aren't irresolvable. You just have to come up with an explanation for them. While I won't go so far as to say "This is the way it has always been," I think that statement is closer to the truth of the matter than a statement like "RIP Forgotten Realms."

But I admit that if I were a superfan of Dragonlance or Greyhawk or Dark Sun canon lore, I would be more worried. Those settings are probably going to be outright reinvented.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I never understood that saying... OF COURSE I'll have my cake and eat it too, what else am I going to do with MY cake?

It’s more like “eating your cake and having it too”. Once you’ve eaten your cake, you can’t really complain that it’s gone.

 

[dave2008]

This might have been covered but I think he was referring to Kanon aka Keith Baker's take on Eberron.

IF you read his blog and such there are quite a few things he does very differently from the official WoTC version, and some of it is stuff that I truly truly love. For example, I don't know if lizardfolk sharing a dream world where they all constantly share the same dreams is something that was ever brought up in WoTC books, but I am infatuated with the idea.

I was strictly responding to the bolded part of comment:

"Eberron "officially" has two canons. One canon is the book that WotC publishes for the Eberron setting. The other canon is the content that Baker and fellow collaborators create on his website and sell in DMsGuild."

I as just saying the Perkins has clarified that only the PHB, MM, DMG is canon. Therefore, the book WotC published on Eberron is not canon. My comment had nothing to do with Keith Baker's Eberron.

 

[Yaarel]

I was strictly responding to the bolded part of comment:

"Eberron "officially" has two canons. One canon is the book that WotC publishes for the Eberron setting. The other canon is the content that Baker and fellow collaborators create on his website and sell in DMsGuild."

I as just saying the Perkins has clarified that only the PHB, MM, DMG is canon. Therefore, the book WotC published on Eberron is not canon. My comment had nothing to do with Keith Baker's Eberron.

Perkins also mentions, "Every campaign ... has its own canon." Eberron has this kind of separate campaign canon for its own unique setting.

Eberron is further complicated by the fact that the setting canon itself divides into WotC setting canon versus Baker setting canon.