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

 

[Scribe]

Basics? Kindness, Compassion, Empathy, and a willingness to go out of your way to help people is good. All of those things seem to be lacking in a world where the Gods accept the Wall of the Faithless

I disagree that the existence of the wall, negates all other things which Good deities do, but fair enough.

 

[Faolyn]

Ok, let's drill down a bit. ((Yes, I realize that the whole Wall argument is WAYYY off topic, but, frankly, we've done the Canon thing into the ground and this is interesting to me. ))

People have pointed to Theros as a good way of doing it. (sorry, did I spell that right?) That using the carrot is acceptable but not the stick. Which, basically, shoots in the foot any argument that forcing PC's to be religious is unacceptable. At the end of the day, it's the same thing - the players choose faith for their characters. Why you are doing it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you don't have an atheist character.

That you, (whoever you are) are okay with it because of the carrot approach, simply is a point of preference. I get that. But, that doesn't make the Wall bad and Theros' Piety rules good. It's simply a case of preference. Both are doing exactly the same thing - pushing players to create characters that have Faith/Piety. Because, in those games, in those settings, having Faith/Piety is important to play. It MATTERS.

But you're not punished if you don't pick a god in Theros. It means you don't have to track Piety and get bonuses--or penalties, if you're impious. And there's a supernatural gift you can take that reflects your unwillingness to worship a god that actually gives you some magical protection from their machinations (in the form of protection from evil and good and things like that).

It's like being a warlock that doesn't take eldritch blast. You can do it, but there aren't any cool invocations for the other cantrips so you won't have all the bennies that other warlocks have. But it means you get to spend those invocations on other things.

There's absolutely no way to compare piety in Theros and the WotF.

 

[pemerton]

There is a subtle difference however. Orwell was attacking the ideas and policies of orthodox Communism. The people who were killed and had their lives ruined for their beliefs. IF Orwell was writing that it was right and just to hate your brother because he believes in Communism, then I would criticize him for it.

Like many anti-Communists, Orwell seems to have regarded leftist intellectuals' adherence to Stalinism as a threat in itself. He passed information about them to the British spies; I would imagine that, as a result, some suffered. (In Australia intellectuals who had their names given to ASIO as suspected Communists suffered - eg they couldn't get jobs with government agencies, for reasons that were opaque to them at the time - and I doubt Britain was different in this respect.)

There is a degree of irony in both (i) writing 1984 and (ii) collaborating with spies in the way that Orwell did, but he wouldn't be the only person whose life exhibited that sort of internal contradiction. Humans are complicated beings.

Whether or not I think Orwell did the right thing, I think he did not do anything wrong in writing the works he did.

Yes, Fiction is about questions of conviction, allegiance and what is or isn't valuable, but at the end of the day, I default to Vonnegut's answer to the meaning of life. "Be Kind to each other."

If we are going to object to any fiction that departs from that view, we may be stuck with a rather anodyne library. That motto will not take us very far in answering many of the questions that actually confront us.

 

[pemerton]

Objectionable to explore? No.

Objectionable to say is the foundation of Good being possible? That's a bit more objectionable.

It's one thing to disagree with the claim good cannot be secured except by treating some people as means rather than ends, for instance by conscripting them into service (whether literally - conscription into a just war - or more figuratively). Different people will have different views about that.

But it's another thing to say that it is objectionable to make that claim. For a start, the whole of modern government seems to depend upon taking it as a given (see eg Weber's "Politics as a Vocation"; or for a more technocratic treatment of somewhat similar ideas, the contemporary work on "nudging").

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's also changing between editions. In 2e Orcus, Demogorgon, Yeenoghu and Baphomet were actual deities (and demonlords). Graz'zt however was not

I really think D&D would be better off with either;

1) No evil “gods”, just The Gods and The Fiends

or

2) No fiends, just good and evil gods.

No they didn't. They always fought using both sword and spell, but not at the same time. That's a change.

Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade. They are literally a weapon attack and also a spell.

The idea that the FR "faithless" are stand-ins for real-world atheists strikes me as no different from the idea that FR's Orcs can't be a racist trope because they're not humans: it's treating the in-fiction as literal and ignoring the actual trope and theme that are at work.

This seems backward. Rejecting the criticism of the wall is the same as rejecting the criticism of orcs. In both cases, a thing reflects, whether intentionally or not, a thing in the real world, and is problematic because of it. Meanwhile, some folks want to pretend the association doesn’t exist or is invalidated by “it’s fiction”.

 

[Remathilis]

Again, define Good and Evil. I think the Good gods, would stand up as 'good', but nobody is perfect.

The good news is that D&D is getting rid of alignment so there is no more good or evil in D&D.

 

[Faolyn]

I would go further. The more evil deities (as well as demon lords and devils) are precisely the type of entities that aren’t likely to grant healing to their followers even if they could.

So what distinguishes a priest of Bane from a priest of Yeenoghu?

Well, that depends a great deal on the individual interpretations of demons and whatnot--and whether or not Yeenoghu would have warlocks, and of what sort, and if the DM requires worshipers of Yeenoghu to be fiendlocks when, let's face it, the types of powers in the fiendlock archetype are not flavored right for Yeenoghu anyway (fiendlocks are almost entirely fire damage-based). And Yeenoghu isn't going to have warlocks that pretend to be good healer priests.

But Grazz'zt, Fraz-Urb'luu, Moloch, or Titivilus? I could see it.

 

[Scribe]

The good news is that D&D is getting rid of alignment so there is no more good or evil in D&D.

No Alignment, no Canon, no Lineage ASI. What am I paying for again? lol

 

[Faolyn]

You asked whether the Wall is something that players can affect. A game in which there are fictional elements that (i) the players would like to engage with, and (ii) can't, is a railroad.

Or a setting element that isn't supposed to be messed with.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'd rather oblivion, than an infinite number of refusals of the gods, personally.

Okay. No reason you shouldn’t be able to choose that.

Oblivion can literally just be a loss of all knowledge and memory, it needn’t be fully existential. Ie, reincarnation could come with a total erasure of anything that came before, turning your soul into essentially an entirely new soul.


Or the universe/the gods could not care about or need souls, and you can choose to fully cease existing.