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, 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."

2014 is the year that D&D 5th Edition launched.

He goes on to say that WotC takes inspiration from past lore and sometimes adds them into official lore.

Over the past five decades of D&D, there have been hundreds of novels, more than five editions of the game, about a hundred video games, and various other items such as comic books, and more. None of this is canon. Crawford explains that this is because they "don’t want DMs to feel that in order to run the game, they need to read a certain set of novels."

He cites the Dragonlance adventures, specifically.

 

[Dire Bare]

To be fair, it took decades for FR lore to build up to "obstacle" levels. If they did create a brand new setting, whether Points of Light or something more built up, it would take a long time before it got to be unwieldy. And they could start out with pointers (maybe just for the setting's writers and not in the books) about what to do and what not to do, to help the lore from becoming unwieldy.

Will WotC do this? Almost certainly not. But they could.

Heh, Realms-lore was at obstacle levels pretty much right out of the gate!

One of the reasons why the Realms transitioned from Ed Greenwood's home game to an official setting, is the popularity of the articles Greenwood was writing for Dragon Magazine back in the day. The man isn't a great storyteller (IMO), but he is a world-builder. A very, very detail-orientated and prolific world-builder. There was scads of overly detailed lore before the first campaign boxed set was printed!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Heh, Realms-lore was at obstacle levels pretty much right out of the gate!

One of the reasons why the Realms transitioned from Ed Greenwood's home game to an official setting, is the popularity of the articles Greenwood was writing for Dragon Magazine back in the day. The man isn't a great storyteller (IMO), but he is a world-builder. A very, very detail-orientated and prolific world-builder. There was scads of overly detailed lore before the first campaign boxed set was printed!

So you're saying the setting became popular initially because of all this "obstructive" lore that's nothing but a detriment? Huh...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I have a friend who's recently been quoting a trivia fact. Do you know which version of Dracula has the Vampire being shot by an American Cowboy? The Original Novel by Bram Stoker. Is Bela Lugosi's 1931 Dracula a lesser movie for changing the canon to not include Mr. Quincey Morris? Is the Original Bram Stoker novel lesser because most versions of Dracula no longer include the character?

What I find surprising is that no one in Hollywood ever picked up on that and made the American the main hero!

Stoker is good at building atmosphere, and the Whitby section is brilliant, but he couldn't write a climactic confrontation!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What I find surprising is that no one in Hollywood ever picked up on that and made the American the main hero!

That sounds like a good lens for a new retelling of the story: The Cowboy Who Shot Dracula. That'd be a great movie, for sure, or you could do another epistalory novel, just one told as letters sent back to the US and language more befitting of a dimestore novel.

 

[TheSword]

When discussions of representation or problematic issues come up regarding older material we're often told "fiction matters." And what they mean by this is that fiction can provide us with new and interesting points of view, it can teach us lessons we apply to the real world, it can comfort us, entertain us, and change our minds. We can have an emotional attachment to fiction. I'm used to be a big Star Trek fan (orthodox Trekkie), and I have an emotional attachment to the original series, the next generation, and Deep Space Nine. These shows mean something to me and to a lot of other people as well. I know it sounds silly, but here's a nice story about astronaut Ronald McNair for whom the original Star Trek was something he eagerly devoured as a teenager.

If fiction matters then it matters what people do with it. If a new Star Trek series were to come along and suddenly tell me everything from TOS was invalid it would piss me off. Eh, for a certain value of pissed. I'm an adult so it's not like I'm going to fly into a rage or anything but I'd definitely be unhappy. So I can understand why some people are unhappy with something they've invested in for many years is suddenly not canon. When Disney declared the extended universe to not be canon I was overwhelmed. It was as if hundreds of thousands of nerds suddenly cried out at once and were suddenly silenced.

Edit: And I say this as someone who doesn't mind if they change the lore. I just recognize that for those who have a connection to the lore it kind of sucks for them.

Ok but the way it matters is not because it’s binding on future publications. But rather because it informs of us of the tone and style of that game world in that point of time. And more importantly it informs us of what the writer and publisher wants us to think or feel.

None of that is invalidated by having a story remade in the future.

To be honest there is also a big difference between a marvel reboot and the Forgotten Realms. The big reason being the vast vast vast majority of FR lore won’t be touched by 5e. It just won’t mention it, or invalidate it at all.

The Dragonrage Mythal probably won’t get mentioned, Druth Dearn probably will never be heard from, the Haunted Halls of Evenstar are probably not going to be scrubbed from the map and replaced with a chicken farm.

If anything 5e has shown its more likely to be inspired by and give cheeky nods to the previous lore. I’m happy with that. More than happy, if they keep telling stories in the Realms.

It does smack of ingratitude when WOC have made your campaign setting their main setting and now people are complaining, not that lore has been invalidated, but that it might! I’m struggling to think of any significant piece of lore that 5e specifically has changed that might upset anyone!? So this is all really just teeth gnashing and hand wringing.

 

[Deset Gled]

That sounds like a good lens for a new retelling of the story: The Cowboy Who Shot Dracula. That'd be a great movie, for sure

It's been done.

Billy the Kid Versus Dracula - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Dire Bare]

So you're saying the setting became popular initially because of all this "obstructive" lore that's nothing but a detriment? Huh...

Yup.

Or at least, popular with a subset of the fanbase back in the 80s. Times change though, and while the Realms has always been a very popular setting, one of the biggest complaints folks have about it is . . . you guessed it! The volume and specificity of the lore. Even folks who love the Realms often feel bogged down by the lore.

Plus, TSR never did a very good job at really understanding what the customer base, as a whole, wanted. It was interesting to read about Greenwood's setting in Dragon Mag, and later in all of the books and boxed sets, but . . . . how useful was all of that in home games?

Personally, I enjoy (most of) the Realms lore, I love reading about it . . . but I don't sweat the details when I run Realms games, pretty much just like WotC handles the lore for their adventures. I have a sneaky suspicion there's more of us who treat the Realms like this, than those who are immersed in the lore and need it all to remain canon, consistent, and respected (from their POV).

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We need some canon to avoic troubles about what is true or false. In previous editions the elves could live more 1000 years and now "only" 300. But the canon may be a double edge weapons, because if the publisher creates new crunch, for example classes, monsters and PC races then to explain how these can appear in previous setting.

One solution could be to add the idea of ucronies or parallel worlds, but this could need a lot of explanations. Maybe the next year Hasbro CEOS order elements from the "Hasbroverse" (Transformers, M.A.S.K, Micronauts, Visionaries, G.I.Joe, Action Man) to be added to the D&D Multiverse, or in a "spin-off" universe, the one from Gamma World. Or there is a new deal between Disney and Hasbro, to create a mash-up of Star Wars with a touch of space fantasy.

I support the idea of parallel worlds in D&D, for example one where lord Sorth is a death knight, but the leader of the resistance of Krynn against the invasion of Vodoni empire (Spelljammer faction). But I wonder if D&D multiverse has got, or should have got, a timecop or something like the Time-Variance-Authority from Loki serie, based in the lore of AD&D Chronomancer.

Meme with a scene from Loki (action-live miniserie)

 

[TheSword]

So I did a bit of research as to what the main inconsistencies and what lore had been invalidated by 5e. Not really sure what I would find. I was not impressed. Most of the issue I read fell into two categories…

Maps: X location isn’t featured on Y map or has moved slightly. People were actually complaining that the new Daggerford map art has Daggerford on a different bank of the river… so freaking what!

Dates: Complaints that X reference means that Y creature is only 30,000 years old not 40,000 years old. Or that B ruler must have been at war with C kingdom because the D war was happening at that point. I say again so freaking what!

This isn’t lore, it’s pedantry. ‘Facts’ that most probably the writers who wrote it the first time round weren’t even that focused on. They have zero impact on adventures, or the players interaction with the world. It’s just a distraction that would be a drain on resource to try and get right. Everything that I saw could easily be explained with unreliable cartographers and unreliable historians. Problem solved.

This issue is particularly daft, when a persons campaign ceases to be cannon, the moment the DM or PCs start interacting and changing it. Once the PCs are involved my world becomes different to your world. As soon a I start writing my adventures there are differences between my world and the cannon world.

[To be clear I’m not talking about the Spellplague removing large areas of land and replacing them. I’m talking about a town moving 20 miles East or not being featured on a different editions map… as if maps in RPG products have ever purported to hold every single detail!]

 

[Hussar]

@TheSword - I pretty much agree with you here. So much of the issues with FR have been, frankly, pedantry. Because there is SO much material, it's virtually impossible not to contradict someone any time you put pen to paper. And, like you say, so much of it is pretty petty. Heck, even the bigger stuff, like the Spell Plague, was largely people losing their poop over relatively minor details. Ok, so, they've plonked down a new land over yonder. Well, guess what, over yonder hadn't seen an adventure or a supplement in twenty years. Who cares???

Well, folks apparently cared a LOT. But, now, because those folks that cared are an ever shrinking minority of gamers, that voice is just getting drowned out by those who really don't care that much but just want cool ideas for the setting.