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

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

Right. They could literally just reincarnate them. Nothing wasted, nothing lost, no evil done.

 

[Scribe]

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.

The wall isnt terrible at all. Its an eventual oblivion.

Would you not rather a resource be available to you later, than never?

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Neither does the Thayans having slaves. If you're going to draw connections to real world things, then the Thayans massacring families has similarities to other countries and armies than massacred families. Why is it that only discrimination is the only atrocity worthy enough to be connected to the real world?

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.

So a real world country invading another and killing off large swathes of the population is not that bad, because they didn't discriminate in the process. No need to remove parallel bad stuff in the game, because hey, at least when the mass murder happened in the real world, it wasn't based on race, religion, etc.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

The legends of the exploits of the Bladedancers will include the rare ability to use sword and spell together. That's lore. Lore that didn't exist before Tasha's.

 

[Maxperson]

Right. They could literally just reincarnate them. Nothing wasted, nothing lost, no evil done.

Yeah. I removed the wall in my game, not because of any sort of thing with atheism, but rather because it was just a dumb idea. Souls are power in D&D and the gods wouldn't just fritter that away. The faithless get gathered by the god of death and become his petitioners(to use Planescape terminology).

 

[the Jester]

Have you seen how many times D&D has equated beauty with goodness and ugliness with evil? I realize that's a standard fantasy/mythology trope, but it's not one that D&D has ever shied away from.


Strahd, for all of his power, has always been treated as a villain that the PCs can thwart or even kill.

Has the Wall ever been something the players can affect?

Regarding the beauty thing, I feel like you dodged the question. Just because, for instance, I use an adventure where the BBEGs are hags and the Good aligned, friendly npc is a nymph doesn't mean that I believe beautiful = good. Heck, I can present multiple conflicting belief systems without believing in any of them.

When I write up a religion's details for my game, I do it from that faith's perspective. A god of children is going to view protecting kids as a great and noble endeavor, while a god of murder might see killing them as righteous. I don't believe both of those things, and had I chosen a different example, I might believe neither of them.

As to the WotF being something players can affect, I honestly don't know. I'm not a FR guy, and I neither run nor play in nor keep up with the lore surrounding the Realms very much. I will say that, in my game, pretty much anything is something the players can affect, if they go about it right and are powerful enough. But that's probably not equally true in the Realms. (Maybe? I don't know.) Regardless, even if it was never made explicit that it was something the pcs could affect, was it ever stated that they couldn't do anything about it?

Actually- that would have made an excellent epic level 3.5e adventure for FR: Heroes Attempt to Destroy the Wall of the Faithless.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

Then they don't serve the purpose of gods in the setting. They're exarchs of an untouchable, unreachable, probably actually evil, god.

Hell, they didn't even originally need worship to survive. Some of them existed before mortals did, and none of them needed worship to live until Ao rewrote the cosmos to make it so.

Or, we could accept that they've decanonised the wall, and Ao doesn't need to be the bad guy, and the gods don't need to be middlemen with little actual power. I mean, as it is, the purpose they serve seems to mostly be to excuse blowing up the setting every once in a while, and being macguffins that blow up the setting if they get broken.

In my current (possibly final) FR campaign, Ao is going to be revealed to actually be tied to the main story arc, and the PCs big goals, and part of the artificer/rogue's destiny as The Thief of Fate is to steal the Tablets of Heaven from Ao, or more accurately to steal Ao's place in the cosmos and hand it over to the true gods. What becomes of Ao after that will depend on the PCs, but one idea I have is to have Them become like the librarian god from Dragonlance, a watcher and recordkeeper, freed from the burden of a power They never wanted and were tricked into taking up.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah. I removed the wall in my game, not because of any sort of thing with atheism, but rather because it was just a dumb idea. Souls are power in D&D and the gods wouldn't just fritter that away. The faithless get gathered by the god of death and become his petitioners(to use Planescape terminology).

I mean that works too. I figure reincarnation is a good hook because it then gives a strong place in the setting for reincarnation, which opens up more stories. I also just...don't use a lot of the planescapey elements of the afterlife, but that's a whole other thing, and possibly a whole thread about how I don't really like how exactingly DnD defines the cosmology.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Neither does the Thayans having slaves. If you're going to draw connections to real world things, then the Thayans massacring families has similarities to other countries and armies than massacred families. Why is it that only discrimination is the only atrocity worthy enough to be connected to the real world?

So a real world country invading another and killing off large swathes of the population is not that bad, because they didn't discriminate in the process. No need to remove parallel bad stuff in the game, because hey, at least when the mass murder happened in the real world, it wasn't based on race, religion, etc.

Whataboutism has no validity on any level, ever.

If people read the lore for Thay and felt uneasy because the description reminded them of real world slavery in a way that felt like the game echoing the rhetoric of slavers and apologists, it would need to be changed. The harm might be such that alteration would be insufficient and it would have to be removed instead, but it might well be perfectly fine to simply make Thayan slavery function more like Roman slavery and also be a thing being actively resisted by the few Good factions within Thay, and even some of the more neutral folks, thus marking it as something the setting recognizes as a bad thing.

If Cormyr had chattel slavery but remained otherwise the "Good forest kingdom", it would be a unacceptable.

At some point, you'll have to reckon with the fact that what is being argued isn't that "this bad thing can't exist in the game world", but rather that "this bad thing shouldn't be presented as neutral or good or necessary, while echoing the rhetoric and apologetics of real world discrimination".

The legends of the exploits of the Bladedancers will include the rare ability to use sword and spell together. That's lore. Lore that didn't exist before Tasha's.

That literally is their lore before Tasha's. From their 5e inception they had access to cantrips that do exactly that, and have had the shadowblade spell for a long time as well. What's more, turns don't exist. Rounds don't exist. There is no in-fiction difference between stabbing mundanely and then using Booming Blade and stabbing mundanely and then using Booming Blade.

 

[lingual]

The lore had to change. Before the lore of Bladesingers didn't involve them having the in-fiction ability to attack and cast a cantrip at the same time. After the changed the lore changed to allow that. When mechanics have an in-fiction impact, there is lore involved.

Doesn't that logically lead to the conclusion that any change in mechanics (optional or otherwise) requires changes in lore (optional or otherwise) and "canon". I can't see such a model scaling well.