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.

 

[Scribe]

I would imagine there are 3PP who publish living settings. If not, there is a gap in the market that you could fill.

If I had 20+ years to organically grow a setting with support and capital to leverage across multiple types of media....sure.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

It was. Ed started writing stories set in what became the FR before he played D&D. When he started D&D he used his setting as the background.

Also a lot of novels did drive metaplot during editions. E.g. Return of the Archmages, The Last Mythal, Threat from the Sea, The Hunters Blade, The Cormyr Saga. The only novels written to incorporate edition changes were the Avatar Trilogy and the Sundering.

And the trilogy that showed how the Spellplague happened. I forgot the name.

 

[FrozenNorth]

But.

Too much insistence on canon will degrade both functions and create additional problems. In the first case, immersion suffers when bad writing and bad ideas are added to canon. This is why stuff like the Star Wars Christmas Special gets decanonized: Pretending the Christmas Special never happened is less immersion-breaking than trying to incorporate it into your mental model of the Star Wars universe.

I agree and I want to emphasize the immersion-breaking aspect of canon, which is a particular issue on RPGs (and in properties with a large canon like FG).

Without using a “flexible” interpretation of canon, you end up with the unrealistic situation of the Sword Coast having been threatened with destruction forty times (including novels, adventure paths, comics, video games, etc) by independent forces in the past 20 years Dale reckoning.

 

[Alzrius]

And the trilogy that showed how the Spellplague happened. I forgot the name.

The Haunted Lands trilogy, I believe.

 

[Mirtek]

And the trilogy that showed how the Spellplague happened. I forgot the name.

Now looking at them, I think we can say that as a rule of thumb the trilogies advanced the plot, the stand alone novels didn`t

 

[FrozenNorth]

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

I was initially confused by your comment, but now I understand what you meat.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Of these events. Some fansite surely must have written them down. So when you get the reference in the show, you can later go online and read up on it

If you had read past the first line, you would have seen I understood that, and then laid out why that doesn't exactly help the situation.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

The Haunted Lands trilogy, I believe.

No, I looked it up, its trilogy Empyrean Odyssey.

 

[Chaosmancer]

To give a bit of insight as to why people are so passionate about canon in general, I follow a blog that reviews the old Archie Comics licensed Sonic the Hedgehog series issue-by-issue because I read the first 125 or so way back when and they eventually got shockingly bizarre. At one point they established that the Sonic characters exist because a race of aliens called the Xorda mutated Earth's life forms with "gene bombs" over 1000 years prior as an intended genocide against humankind as vengeance for the vivisection of the Xorda ambassador led by an ancestor of Dr. Robotnik.
View attachment 141300
View attachment 141301

People are sending the author of the blog questions and comments about the canon of those comics despite them ending in 2016. Which isn't as surprising as it sounds, as the lead writer of those comics from issues 160 (in 2006) to 294 (2016) loved reintroducing characters and elements that had been introduced and abandoned in the issues prior to his joining the team as lead writer. Perhaps the most surprising instance was when he brought back a character who only appeared once in issue 16 as a major recurring character in issue 233, 18 years after the character's single prior appearance in the comics. He also once bothered to explain a single reference way back in the early days of the comics of Sonic's world having "1000 moons" as actually being about ancient human-built space colonies.

To tie this back into D&D, some people just find digging up obscure old lore and either utilizing it as is or expanding upon it fun, as this guy clearly did.

Personally, though I hadn't started playing D&D until around 2006, I find the old lore I've learned about the War of Law and Chaos, the Wind Dukes of Aaqa, the Rod of Seven Parts, the Queen of Chaos, Miska the Wolf-Spider, the Obyriths, the invasion of the Abyss by celestial eladrin, and the battles between the Princes of Elemental Good and Evil fascinating. If I had free reign to make an official D&D book I'd probably make a planes-spanning adventure heavily based on that lore with the goal of stopping the return of the Queen of Chaos and Miska the Wolf-Spider with the aid of the Princes of Elemental Good and the celestial eladrin.

And that sort of stuff is great, it can be wonderful to make a call back to something from the beginning of a series later on. That sort of thing is really fun.

But, here is the thing.

That is a single author's prerogative in their work. Archie Comics is no longer making Sonic comics to my knowledge, they've created a new comic line. And that is okay. The Archie lore is still there, still complete and still readable. But there isn't any reason that it has to be the only Sonic story.

I still just think there is this barrier here. Like, no one is saying continuity and callbacks are bad. WE are just saying that it is fine to have a different version of the same story. There isn't anything wrong with that.

 

[Mirtek]

If you had read past the first line, you would have seen I understood that, and then laid out why that doesn't exactly help the situation.

I disagree with your reasoning. Those fans super invested will have read up on those events before. Those fans with above average interest will read up on those events afterwards. And then the average audience doesn't care enough and has missed ordinary episodes inbetween anyway. So for them it's just one more thing they're not aware of and don't care much about