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.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The 5E designers have been trying and trying and trying to get it through people's heads that they do not care about worrying about "canon" since they began producing books for 5E... especially regarding the Forgotten Realms. That's why they've told us from the beginning that they weren't going to produce a 5E Faerun campaign setting book... because inventing "updates" to all the obscure nations across the globe following the Spellplague and the years after that was a waste of time, energy, and money if it didn't serve a purpose to the game. (Not the Grand History "novel" that people have invented out of it.) If any of that work didn't help players run or play in the game, they weren't going to do it. And that's why they made almost all the Forgotten Realms material from all the previous editions available on D&D Classics and DMs Guild... so that if really needed to know something about Turmish, you could get it.

This "declaration" is exactly the same thing. They are pointing out to everyone that every single detail R.A. Salvatore has written about in his 600 Drizzt novels does not need apply to anyone's personal game. If you want your game to go to Gauntlgrym... you do not need to read his books about it to get the details about that city. You can make 'em up. Or adapt another product for it. Or however else you want to accomplish it. There is no "canon" about Gauntlgrym you need worry about for your game. YOUR game is "canon" for as much as it helps you and your players play. Anything else are just details you can choose to use or not use as you see fit.

 

[Alzrius]

Sure, each person has their own individual lines... but that also kind of ties into what I'm talking about.

Did they de-legitimize the framework for Unther? We don't have a replacement framework, so I'd say that the pointing to the best current framework is still legit, until they do something that disrupts it.

I disagree, because the nature of canon is a declaration of status, which means that if something is declared to be non-canon, a change has been introduced unto itself (i.e. the status of the material) even if no alternatives are subsequently put forward. The current framework, in this instance, has been declared to not be part of the greater whole (i.e. that which is canon) and so no longer is understood to be part of the conceptual framework that you make use of when engaging with the lore in that particular mode.

That's the thing I think people are overlooking because of the highly emotional response. This announcement was an announcement of a willingness to change. It was not an announcement of changes. If they never touch on Vaasa again, then nothing ever has to change from the previous canon.

To declare something non-canon is a change unto itself. Like with the islanders who are told that they're now living under the political purview of a foreign power, it might not have any practical implications, but the nature of the change is something very real, and for a lot of people it's very substantive (and not something to be happy about).

Fair, but the only conceptual change is an appeal to authority. That is literally it. The material doesn't change. The way you can choose to use it hasn't changed. The only change is that stamp of approval from WoTC that they support your vision of the truth.

And that is very much the least important thing if your goal is to continue using what you have always used.

The authority is important, because that's a fundamental aspect of the nature of canon: it's a determination that's made entirely external to you (in the general sense of the word "you"). That externalization grounds it, making it more real, because it gives it a quality of immutability - or at least, immutability in terms of personal whim - which is something it then shares with the real world.

Complete disagreement.

Canon is "the agreed upon history, lore and rules of fiction".

I suspect that this is where a lot of our inability to reach a consensus is coming from, because I'm of the opinion that canon is more than simply agreeing on the history/lore/rules; as mentioned above, it requires an authoritative determination of what's part of the imaginary world and what's not, and in so doing removes personal issues of agreement from the equation entirely. Even if you have different universes, storylines, or alternative takes on the same body of work, their canonity ("canonicity"?) is determined by the individual(s) who have authority over that particular work; not by the fans or other people who engage with the material.

Now, as noted previously, fans can break from canon in terms of how much they want to personally recognize, utilize, or otherwise partake of. But that doesn't change the nature of what's canon unto itself. It's just a degree of interaction.

But I think that the two can't be seperated that cleanly. By engaging with RPG canon, you by necessity have to change it, so having an entire set of canon that isn't true anymore is kind of the default state. Orcus is alive in Canon. If you kill him, you have changed Canon. And that isn't something people are upset by, in fact, they are eager to try and kill Orcus, despite it irrevocably harming canon.

It doesn't "harm" the canon (as I see it) because you're not changing the canon; it still exists, independent of what happens in your game. What happens in your home game isn't recognized by the authority which determines canon for that particular conceptual framework. Likewise, I'm of the opinion that the different modes of engagement can be separated very cleanly from each other. Using art as an example, you can still appreciate the technical skill of Venus Callipyge without caring about the statue's historical or erotic aspects; that mode of engagement is independent of the others, the same way engaging with lore for your home game is independent of engaging with it as an imaginary realm with externally-defined boundaries.

 

[FrozenNorth]

You can believe what you want, I guess. I expect there's a pretty steep drop-out rate well before the players hit 60. That segment is going to have the "long tail" of smaller and smaller numbers of gamers as you go up.

I know I’M not intending to live past 55…

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I considered a Boycott of WotC/Hasbro briefly, but rejected it for two reason. One, morally boycotting something over content feels like an an attack on free speech and I have seen to much harm come from that sort of thing to engage in it myself,

Uh-oh…

which is why I refused to engage in the Gillette boycott, although I was sympathetic (I never bought the product to begin with to he fair, so my refusal to join in was symbollic at best).

Double uh-oh!

i was fully convinced by most of the arguments here about the problems with ditching canon…but now you had to bring up bad faith defenses of free speech (that require a default misrepresentation of what free speech is) and the Gillette boycott by men’s rights weirdos.

anyone who thinks politics is not everywhere and in all things, take note. Dig deep enough and it always bubbles to the surface.

 

[Steampunkette]

A number of people in this thread have expressed that having the works they grew up on deemed "not true" does have an impact on them, and their ability to read and enjoy those works. You can decide that it doesn't matter, or they're liars, or whatever; but an impact is being had.

"Not Canon" and "Not True" are different things.

Luke Skywalker is canonically not a whiny pissbaby. But we saw the movies and we know the -truth-. So does all of Tosche Station 'cause they could hear him -whining- from the moisture farms.

That said... If the people are having the problem where they're intercorrelating those two ideas then yeah. There's gonna be impact.

In Adventurers' League, are you officially bound by lore outside of the module? If so, I suppose that would be a problem. If not - assuming "it's not canon in this game" wasn't enough - couldn't DMs just say "this is what the module says - it's canon for this module"?

(On that note, that seems like a fair strategy if any 5E-exclusive lore arguments come up. And they surely will.)

I'll just go ahead and answer this with the last one rather than answering it here.

Even easier than that, actually - none of the books or games are canon. (Ironically, this means someone can have a reverse-canon argument - reference Baldur's Gate III and they can now say "but that's not part of 5E lore"...)

Yup! And isn't that -better- than having some dorkus at your table referencing the Nautilus flying through the skies of Faerun zworping people off the street while Githyanki chase it on red dragons as part of their level 1 character's backstory?

Out of curiosity, if seven years is manageable, at what point would the lore become too unwieldy for your preferences?

As I explained in my next post: 7 years is pretty manageable 'cause there's, like, 3-5 books for any given setting. You've got 2 for Ravenloft (3 if you count the reprint) 1 for Eberron, and a bunch for Forgotten Realms. 'Cause 2e Oversaturated Every Setting. To the point where they went out of business because of it.

But the real reason that length of time is reasonable? Because we're all living it, together, now.

You and I have been playing D&D for a -long- time. We've absorbed modules, lore books, splat books, novels, and videogames over the course of decades. Sometimes 2-3 a year, sometimes 10-12 in a year for a given setting based on what we could afford and how much time we had to absorb the material in our day to day lives.

And, of course, that's assuming we had the cash, or the friends who bought the product, to get the chance to read or play.

Having all that mess be canon going forward means either paying someone who has played all of D&D in the past half-century and read and memorized all of the material to be on staff and play copy-editor on every piece of Material anyone at WotC puts out as a fact-check and canonicity expert.

Like how Peter Jackson had to hire Tolkien Experts to ensure he didn't screw up the movies (And Stephen Colbert still gotchya'd the expert 'cause he's a Tolkien Meganerd).

And, of course, also presents a MASSIVE INFORMATION GAP between longtime players and newbies. Which feeds into gatekeeping and bullying behaviors which we all know and I would hazard most of us have either experienced firsthand or witnessed.

So in the end: This is a good thing for pretty much everyone except those who have built an identity over knowing the full "Canon" of a given setting. But all that requires is a quick perspective or terminology change. I know -so much- of Dark Sun's "Canon" and even in starting a thread about how to carry it forward I grognarded all over it about how Dark Sun's identity 'should be' based on that Canon.

Now I just consider myself someone who knows a lot about the Dark Sun Books without the weight of "Canon" on top of that term. It's still cool to me, the lore that I know, but divorcing it from canon means we get to reinvent Rajaat and the Champions. Reinvent the Mysteries of Athas. And that's a huge gift.

Ultimately... the issue isn't that it's not "Canon" anymore. The issue is that people are ascribing "Truth" to Canon and basing an aspect of their identity around that. Divorce yourself from the idea of "True" and you'll be a lot happier, there, I think.

God knows I am.

Again, I doubt this policy will do anything to stop bullies. They'll still use the lore as a bludgeon, be it 40 years or 7 years or one book or "but earlier in the game you said..." The problem is bullies, not canon. And it's not fair to punish nice folks who liked canon for what bullies did with it.

This is a pretty revealing part. It's why I left it, before, to address when we got down here.

"Bullies". You think of people who have issues with the Canon being changed and talking about it vehemently as Bullies. That people who will spend 20 minutes during a game discussing whether or not X event is or isn't or should or shouldn't be canon are Bullies. Those people will just argue about something else. They'll argue about something said 20 minutes ago, 6 years ago, 40 years ago, or Rules.

Well I see 64 pages of people arguing about the Canonicity of Lore. Accusing people of "Throwing them under the bus" and demanding the company change their stance and reinstate the old lore as "Canon". Like full on -petitions- for that. Some of them have spawned off a Side-Thread to try and display just how "Weak" the current canon is in an attempt to prove that the old Canon is better. Arguing over what "Should" or "Shouldn't" be Canon.

And you, JEB, champion of the nice folks who just like the old Canon and are being "Punished" because of the "Bullies" who is somehow deeply offended that WotC would declare -all- the Modules as having their own Canonicity in advance, rather than going one by one by one and saying "This one's canonicity is self-contained, that one's canonicity includes all prior lore"... Are telling me "You can just tell people that the canon is self contained at the table!"

Well. There you go, JEB. WotC is telling you that all the Canon is self-contained. It's not "Punishing" any given player based on what lore they liked or know from 30 years ago. It's just them announcing that all the WotC products are "Self-Contained Canon" or "Canon for this Adventure".

Problem solved!

 

[FrozenNorth]

I disagree, because the nature of canon is a declaration of status, which means that if something is declared to be non-canon, a change has been introduced unto itself (i.e. the status of the material) even if no alternatives are subsequently put forward. The current framework, in this instance, has been declared to not be part of the greater whole (i.e. that which is canon) and so no longer is understood to be part of the conceptual framework that you make use of when engaging with the lore in that particular mode.

Was the stuff from Forgotten Realms ever declared canon, or is this just something the fans declared?

 

[Scott Christian]

Except, you know, me, one of my players when he began DMing, and other younger DMs that I have interacted with online.

Yes, I do not doubt there are quite a few that did and still do. I am issuing anecdotal evidence based on my 15 years of running D&D clubs in high schools, running the 4th edition games in gaming stores, and running a hundred con games. I am absolutely, 100% certain, that several of those young players I watched play have or went on to read the old lore. But, most I have seen do not. Like I said, they bring their own interests to the game: anime, manga, tv, video games. Most I watch play now cannot even tell you who Drizzt is. This is how the game evolves. There is nothing wrong with it.

 

[Dausuul]

Again, you're talking about episodes that aired before I was even born, and I'm not that young. New Who does not reference Atlantis at all, AFAIK.

Only in passing. There's a bit in "The Magician's Apprentice" where they're pulling up a history of all the Doctor's interventions on Earth, and they mention "three possible versions of Atlantis."

I never understood what that line was about until now.

 

[Alzrius]

Was the stuff from Forgotten Realms ever declared canon, or is this just something the fans declared?

The fans recognized the declaration, which is inherent in the release of the material by the recognized authority.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That sounds like a potentially really cool AU, to be honest.

I think that's a cool AU as well. I would, for my part, happily play that game. But Star Wars has it's own story, and what makes that AU interesting in the context of Star Wars is that it differs from the baseline. You still need the baseline, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to play within the baseline universe, around the big events. Despite what Kylo Ren insisted, you dont have to "blow up the past".