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.

 

[Mercurius]

Here's what I am trying to get at: empathy is the ability to see why people might feel certain ways, even though you feel differently. The idea that nobody should care about this one issue because you personally don't care about it is swinging very wide of the point.

That's a bit of a red herring, Reynard. Further, one can have empathy and still address logical or cognitive inconsistencies that might, if recognized, reduce whatever the concern is. I'm sorry that your enjoyment of the Realms is diminished by this statement of WotC's, but I'm also trying to point out that there are shifts in perspective that could allow you to retain your enjoyment, while also embracing WotC's approach.

Also, I did edit in a question in my last post, which I'll restate: what sort of canon changes would you object to, and what would you be ok with? Where is the line, and how does it differen in the novels vs setting books?

 

[Henadic Theologian]

So, back in the 1990s, before message boards were common (and were very janky -- I ran some back then, and they were a never-ending source of headaches with security holes and simply crashing regularly), this was a regular topic of discussion on use.net (look it up, kids!) in the White Wolf forums.

There was a dramatic and loud split between people who bought White Wolf products as books to be read and those who bought them for the sake of play. At some point, White Wolf decided that readers were more important than gamers and strongly leaned into metaplot and what one might call a casual approach to balance and rules mastery.

As this went on, it became harder and harder to use their books to play games, often, since there was little gameable in many of them and what was in there was poorly done at best. (And, even for the standards of 1990s adventures, there was a whole lot of watching the company's big name NPCs do the cool stuff while the player characters were sometimes were physically unable to intervene.)

This wasn't sustainable and White Wolf eventually stopped fooling around and initiated the end of the world across all of its game lines. (It was a very fin de siècle set of games, with the looming end of the century/millennium/world hanging over all of them.) So we got a big canonical ending to the stories, some of it actually gameable, and a situation that, frankly, made all parties involved mad.

The company then launched a new World of Darkness (now called the Chronicles of Darkness), cleaning up the rules, fixing up the setting (notably making it less racist, 20 years before D&D) and all but demolishing metaplot. While CoD has a lot of merits (pun intended), it was never the commercial success of WoD, as they'd successfully alienated almost everyone, and the company has bounced through owners for several years and they've brought back the original World of Darkness not once in recent years, but twice (a 20th anniversary line and a continuation of a "whoops, the world didn't end after all" WoD line).

All of which is to say that I think game books should be primarily meant to be books that are used for a game. If other people want to buy them, great. But the products that are designed to appeal to people who are interested in the setting and the characters in a game world should be something other than game books: make them novels, comics, videogames, coffee table books, statuettes, etc.

Because if you decide that your primary audience for game books isn't gamers, you will eventually kill off (or at least mortally wound) the goose that lays the golden eggs, just like White Wolf eventually did.

I as this as someone who prefers and loves the Chronicles of Darkness over the WoD, the consequences destroying the World of Darkness destroyed White Wolf, which once had been a major competitor of WotC, if The Onyx Path hadn't made a deal for licensing Exalted, WoD, and CoD, these setting would have been dead.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

TMNT-aficionados and Transformers-aficionados seem to be able to muster the focus.

I mean, sure. But no one else does, and that's what, 95% of people who have seen Transformers movies? More?

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I mean, seriously, do you actually believe WotC made this decision specifically out of spite to FR fans? Really?

The idea that WotC, which has published a 5E book set in FR at least once every year, secretly wants to screw Ed Greenwood and destroy all of FR's works pre-5E is and is nursing an evil grudge against the setting... it's so patently ridiculous.

It's so much more difficult to take seriously your belief that making all this non-canon is negative if you indulge in such nonsense.

Yes I do believe that, sincerely. They don't hate their version of FR, they hate what came before, but they still want to milk the profits from it.

 

[Rabulias]

There's about to be 45 new movies and TV shows, to say nothing of the generally very well received canon comic books. (Dr. Aphra is a great addition to Star Wars, I think most would agree.) A Mara Jade-like character seems inevitable.

EDIT: Other stuff that has been brought back from the extended universe:

Not to derail the thread here too much, but how could you forget the EU idea of Boba Fett escaping from the sarlacc?

 

[Bolares]

The most important take for me in this thread... at least 4 other people like gnomes in enworld. GNOME LOVERS UNITE!

 

[Remathilis]

::sigh:: It is not about the books from the past suddenly disappearing. It is about the new stuff directly contradicting or retconning that material from the past. Because they are invested in the Forgotten Realms (or Eberron or whatever) that IS, based on what has come before, they are afraid the Forgotten Realm of tomorrow won't be the same. That is the loss they are fearing.

Thats... already a thing.

Seriously. D&D continuity is already disjointed mess. Several settings continuities have wildly fluctuated from edition to edition. Hell, within editions things have changed sourcebook to sourcebook. I mean, just a few examples I can think of...

• Asmodeus became the Lord of Hell because he a.) overthrew Lucifer b.) betrayed an unknown human deity or c.) always was a god.
• Succubi are a.) demons b.) devils c.) neither, but a unique type of fiend.
• Dragonmarks in Eberron can manifest a.) only specific marks on specific races or b.) any mark on any race
• Madam Eva in Ravenloft is a.) a powerful Vistani b.) a Green Hag or c.) Strahd's sister

I mean, those were a few I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure lore gurus can find more.

 

[Shardstone]

And all of that would be possible to grow from 1486 DR (or wherever FR currently is at) onward. No need to throw out novels that happened 1273 DR from ever having happened

You mean the novels that don't get reprinted and only get read by the older crowd who grew up with them? Why would they bring up literally hundreds of novels for people to read and keep all that lore around?

 

[Shardstone]

DC I will give you. Marvel in the comics has bent over backwards to keep their canon as close to accurate as they can without messing up the possibility of future stories. Just about ever happened in the Marvel universe...still happened, albeit in broad strokes in some cases. They created the MCU as a separate reality, just like they did with Ultimate universe back in the early 2000s.

So how is this new Forgotten Realms not just a separate reality?

 

[Dungeonosophy]

You seem to be over-thinking this: yes, they aren't treating novels as "canon" (which, let us recall, is actually a term taken from the compilation of religious scriptures), but as resources to be used as desired. Exactly the way they intend for people to use their game materials.

No, I haven't overthought it.
Right, Crawford is saying that the contents of the 5E RPG books are "scripture." One Canon. Which I call the "RPG Studio Timeline" (aka Reality 5-Prime).
And that the contents of all pre-5E RPG materials, 5E novels, 5E video games, etc. are not part of that Canonical Timeline. In the "RPG Studio Timeline," those events did not take place.
That is the content of those paragraphs which Crawford wrote.

But obviously, the Novel stories and Videogame stories "happened" in some imaginal sense, in some reality or timeline. But not in the "RPG Studio Timeline." So they must've taken place in a D&D Novels Timeline and D&D Video Games Timeline(s).
Crawford says these other timelines may or may not be used for inspiration for the RPG Studio Timeline, but they are separate timelines.

Pretty simple.
Just blurring things together with fuzzy words doesn't make it all copacetic.