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.

 

[Parmandur]

They know FR canon and novels matter to FR fans so no its not a stretch, its abundantly clear.

It remains that broadening the fan base is not gatekeeping, and there is nothing that ethically obliges WotC to maintain a perfect canon.

 

[Reynard]

I'm not "making fun" of anyone: I have pointed out that this is what WotC has been doing for 7 years already, and pointed out that, yes, this sort of canon-centric approach is tied to gatekeeping. That's not a joke, but a sober historical judgement.

What you aren't doing that bothers me is that you aren't differentiating between "bad fans" and just "fans" and I can see why some people in this thread think you are attacking them.

 

[Parmandur]

They are driving out old school fans on purpose that is gatekeeping.

Nobody is being driven out, on purpose or otherwise.

 

[RFB Dan]

They never made novels uncanon in FR before, they were sloppy with canon, but they never took it this far. It is gating keeping alright, they want old school fans and creators gone while they milk the corpse of FR.

I'm not sure where that perspective is coming from. I've been playing for decades, and 5e never gave me the impression that they wanted us to "go away."

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

IMO most of the changes to Krynn will probably be to allow for more core stuff content in the setting. Finding ways to add in orcs, tieflings, and other stuff.

Tieflings seem pretty easy -- Takhsis has an outer planes presence and tieflings could just be the product of a new (or old, and not well known, because it was geographically isolated) prior incursion.

Likewise, unless we've seen all the continents of Krynn (have we?), it's not hard to drop in orcs.

Dragonborn, by their very nature, would probably not be a good one to sneak onto a Continent X setting, but should probably be addressed head-on. Maybe draconians are subraces of the new beefed-up dragonborn race. Maybe they're something new, either as a result of previous machinations by various dragon-related entities, or part of a new plan. In 3E, Races of the Dragon put forth a scenario where a player character dragonborn was likely the first one any NPCs had seen. Maybe the same thing might be true with a 5E Dragonlance book. Heck, maybe we could even see kobolds and spellscales in Krynn as well that way.

 

[Parmandur]

What you aren't doing that bothers me is that you aren't differentiating between "bad fans" and just "fans" and I can see why some people in this thread think you are attacking them.

I am certainly not attacking anyone. But toxic ideas and behavior remain toxic.

 

[MGibster]

This doesn't bother me in the least. I think embracing and accepting the irrelevance of my demographic makes this easy to swallow.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

No, just taking the complaints about the potential "evil" of DragonLance including more women and PoC as the natural conclusion of de-emphasizing "canon" as indicative of what's really at issue here for some folks.

Call it what it is, abolishing canon, not demphasing it, that is sugar coating this disaster. I see no connection between decanonizing things in DL including more women and PoC, the women of DL are popular and iconic already.

 

[Bolares]

Stuff like Chewie getting killed by a moon falling on him, or an evil clone named Luuke, were dumped.

Stuff like palpatine clones reap.... oh wait...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They have bigger issues to tackle than the lack of orcs.

Many of those can be addressed via fluff.

Gully dwarves aren't stupider, they're an underclass that other dwarves discriminate against. (And before anyone says that doesn't make sense for the Lawful Good dwarves, I invite you to look at our world.)

Tinker gnomes are just rock gnomes and their devices work as well as any other gnomes' stuff. Maybe they add some beefed-up tinkering rules to the book to show that.

As for Goldmoon's people, get rid of the bad cowboys and Indians cosplay and go with either something more distinctive to Krynn or pick another Earth culture to be influenced by, and either give Goldmoon a different appearance or make it clear that her people have a wide variance of appearances.

People will complain about each of these, but honestly, they're not complaints that I would listen to.