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]

That's pretty much how I read it; not a statement of "FROM NOW ON WE DO THIS" (caps to make it sound all echoed and out of a gladiator movie) but "this is what we've been doing since 2014." All he did was show us how the sausage is made.

Yeah, it's more important to be clear about it now that media tie-ins are starting to come online...but it's not really a change.

 

[Parmandur]

Honestly my assumption is that this is less about getting rid of all canon and more about getting rid of canon that conflicts with 5E canon, given that the upcoming Fizban's Treasury of Dragons establishes that all D&D worlds were created from a First World that was destroyed by a conflict between Bahamut and Tiamat.

It's about distancing books, video games and films from being viewed as Scripture at people's games, or when writing up new books.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And on the other side of the comparison is Doctor Who, where there's so much canon that no matter WHAT they do on the show a portion of the viewers will complain incessantly online because of one thing from a season back in 1973. (and FWIW, Doctor Who has never been really good at keeping themselves on the right side of canon to begin with)

Blizzard Entertainment, which has less canon than many entertainment companies, has an official historian to prevent these issues from happening so often. (People still complain when new information shows that past information was incomplete, but that's probably an unavoidable issue.) Lucasfilm has a whole staff, I believe.

It always amazes me that the BBC's Doctor Who office and similar outfits don't have in-house historians in the same way.

 

[Mirtek]

I think this could be a good thing. Eberron has always done this and was for the better.

I disagree. It's one of the reason I never bought an Eberron novel.

However since the novel line ended years ago, it doesn't really matter what approach the take now. Non-existing novels can't be canon anyway

 

[RFB Dan]

And FWIW this has been a thing since the TSR days. Remember that gawd-awful 1e "Castle Greyhawk" module? That was quickly written over in 2e. Or the Rose Estes Greyhawk novels that created an island kingdom that hasn't been on the maps for like... ever. Or that 80s products placed versions of Blackmoor in both the Known World and Greyhawk. Oerth's "canon" is so messed up that sticking with it might just kill it.

 

[Umbran]

Observing the truth isn't toxic, society needs more of it.

What truth?

That WotC is doing some things some old fans don't like? Fine. They are making a choice. You don't like it. They make choices I don't like fairly frequently. Still make a good game.

That this is somehow a choice specifically made to spite old fans? Nah, that's toxic entitlement talking.

 

[Mirtek]

So, in other words, WotC is telling longtime D&D fans they aren't welcome in 5e and that decades of learning lore isn't appreciated, in fact it's scorned?

Retroactively rebooting all of D&D lore, in all settings and core lore effective 7 years ago?

Since they actually ended the novel line 7 years ago after the Sundering novels, this declaring doesn't really change much. There's no lore thrown out, because no non-splatbook lore was published during those 7 years. The last FR novels came out 2014 and this are still part of the canon.

Edit: Nevermind, I missread the initial statement that as of 2014 only the published game materials are canon and no longer any subsidiary published since 2014 alongside the game material itself. Only after readin again I realized what they truly said. Sad day for me

 

[cmad1977]

Love it.
The people this “pushes out of the hobby” probably aren’t the type of people we want around anyways.

 

[Faolyn]

There is another stream however, where the novels 'happened' and the story existed. Where those characters exist and continue to exist with a history we can all share and recognize as having happened. Because it was canon.

It's also super-confusing to those of us who haven't read any of the novels (like me) and who didn't buy the adventures with the meta-plot elements (like me).

Plus, sometimes adventures have end results that people just don't like. Like the Planescape Faction Wars, where it seems like most people, whether they played the adventure or not, didn't like how they rewrote the factions.

 

[Reynard]

This is a little silly. No one can say something as mild as "the D&D novels aren't great novels" without it being a personal attack?

I was just responding to an extremely broad brush stroke. There are some excellent writers who have written tie in novels for various D&D properties.