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.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well, FR was a story setting long before it became a game setting

No it wasn't, it was the setting for Ed Greenwood's home game, and then the setting was published before the first novel (Dalkwalker on Moonshae).

and while being a game setting it managed to have a always continuing meta plot advancing via no less than 287 (!) novels and just as many game supplements.

The novels where not written with the intention of advancing some "metaplot". Most of them stand as part of a short series in isolation. The same goes for most of the supplements - something like Frostburn did not advance any metaplot. The only time the novels and supplements did any metaplot was to justify changes between editions. And look how well that turned out!

Sometimes a game supplement would introduce a new devlopement that would then be fleshed out in a novel, sometimes a novel would be first and then the events would their way into further game supplements.

Maybe it happened occasionally, when one writer picked up an idea from another writer, but there was no grand design, and no one worried about contradictions.

And FR is far from unique. The #1 RPG in Germany is still DSA and let me tell you that FR was a barely detailed barebone of a setting if compared to the rigid details and metaplot of Aventurien.

W40k is also a popular setting and it too is tirelessly advancing driven from from both the actual gaming side of things as well as from it's novels

Living settings are a thing. But the FR was never designed to be one of them, and Living Greyhawk was a disaster that many fans don't acknowledge. Currently, WotC have no interest in living settings.

 

[grimslade]

The benefit of canon to a lot of people seems to be the concept of a shared world between tables, a sense of a larger community. The fact, regardless of where or with whom you play, there is a shared connection by virtue of using the baseline canon of the same setting. You could talk to someone at a Con and have a reasonable common core of information and experience. The consumption of the extended canon, books, comics, video games, was a way of still being a part of the community even if you couldn't play. So making things non-canon is a way of stripping some people of their inclusion in a community.
The ugly side of this extended community is the gate-keeping that the socially maladjusted use as an excuse to be jerks. Or the devaluation of the individual table experience to that of the collective.
Be gentle with each other. The opinions on canon are a bit more involved than setting off a fireball in Candlekeep or the current state of the halls of Myth Drannor. ENWorld is another extended community and we don't need anyone feeling excluded for voicing their fears and aspirations.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I dunno about it being a one-way street, I've seen plenty of people complain about the changes made in the MCU not hewing close enough to the comics. And since the movies, a lot of the comic characters have started to be drawn more like their movie likenesses.

Another reason people dont complain about the MCU is because it doesn't actually invalidate the source material. It's a separate universe, and changing things in it does not change what happened in the comics at all. Not something we can say about this.

Definitely. And for all the handwringing going on, I don't think anyone would want to play in a campaign 100% bound by canon, where PCs could never effect change that went against the lore.

They never had. Your campaign is un-canon basically the moment it starts.

Another thing I feel I should mention is that even back in the day, they messed up with canon. There are Dragonlance works that feature orcs, at least one novel that has clerical magic before the return of the gods in Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Canon is always going to be swiss cheese.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The benefit of canon to a lot of people seems to be the concept of a shared world between tables, a sense of a larger community. The fact, regardless of where or with whom you play, there is a shared connection by virtue of using the baseline canon of the same setting. You could talk to someone at a Con and have a reasonable common core of information and experience.

This is nonsense. You can speak with someone who has played the same campaign and had a completely different experience.

And that is part of the fun. "When we did that, this happened!"

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yes.

A hard canon approach will always be preferable, as one in which it's constantly reset devalues the setting. To me.

The trouble is, that's not compatible with properties owned by large money-making businesses. You want a trust or a charity for something like that.

Businesses don't benefit from massive hard canon (fnaar fnarr as we'd have said in the '90s lol). They benefit from resets and changes in three big ways apart from the sheer effort of maintaining it:

1) When they do a reset, it attracts interest from fans. Even those mad about it, often buy products involved with it, and usually more lapsed fans are brought back in than angry fans quit. And the lapsed ones are often younger (often they lapsed in teens or early twenties).

2) If something about the canon becomes socially unacceptable, like, maybe when it came out racism or just really wild sexism, or whatever was super-cool. But now it isn't. So with an inflexible canon you're stuck digging around with retcons, inserting new characters, and so on, and it's very tough to work with.

3) It's much easier to get audiences on board if the hard canon is limited. You can have infinite soft canon or lore. People love it. They love that Thanos Copter. But if you have hard canon, you have stuff that makes no sense unless you know other stuff, and that matters, and that, like, you kind of have to limit that. Also for the sake of your writers. Like, if the MCU keeps going, I have no doubt they're going to do some kind of reset or soft reboot so that the writer of Avengers 16 or whatever doesn't have to double check they're not contradicting anything at all from Avengers 1-10, just 11-15.

 

[Parmandur]

No it wasn't, it was the setting for Ed Greenwood's home game, and then the setting was published before the first novel (Dalkwalker on Moonshae).

Small point of order, the Forgotten Realms began with a short story Ed Greenwood wrote about Mirt the Moneylender in Waterdeep when he was 8.

 

[grimslade]

Living settings are a thing. But the FR was never designed to be one of them, and Living Greyhawk was a disaster that many fans don't acknowledge. Currently, WotC have no interest in living settings.

Living Greyhawk was a beautiful disaster. It was some of the best D&D experiences of my life. It was uneven, overpopulated with Oerth Shaking Events and too many fragile egos, but had some of the most awesome inclusive community world-building and detailed background of a shared world. It depended heavily on where the player physically lived. The East coast had The Sheldomar Valley and a decent intermixing of story lines between Keoland, Geoff, Bissel, and Gran March.
The less said about the poor initial Triad of the Bone March and battling beholders in a tier 1 adventure, the better.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I liked the ending of Lost, personally.

I liked that it ended.

 

[grimslade]

I am only reading what people are saying in this thread. Nonsense or not it is a feeling among the pro-canon people.

This is nonsense. You can speak with someone who has played the same campaign and had a completely different experience.

And that is part of the fun. "When we did that, this happened!"

 

[Parmandur]

Lol not remotely.

I mean, it's pretty hard to walk back rhetorically from an admission that canon wasn't ever that seriously enforced, and routinely violated as needed.