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.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Did they erase the continuity when they went from 1e to 2e? Honest question; I don't know.

No, but the Forgotten Realms and Oerth had to have canonical events to explain what are, in retrospect, hilariously small changes in the setting.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Screw Crawford and Wotc. Pissing on history because you dont like it as canon? Legends, Chronicles are what brought Drangonlance to life. Among other settings like Greyhawk.

Ugh.

Does it, though? My Greyhawk, no fooling, came in a folder. The boxed sets after that kind of ruined it, in my mind. Am I beholden to those later works, some of which explicitly attempted to wreck the setting to make it more "interesting?" I definitely don't think any of the Greyhawk novels, including Gygax's, are canon for my game, should I return to Oerth.

Am I required to use everything that's been done for Greyhawk? Do I need to pretend that I love Gargoyle or The Five Shall Be as One the way I love the Village of Homlett?

And if WotC publishes a new World of Greyhawk (which I would bet against ever happening), would they be allowed to publish a version that simulates the game as it was played in 1979? Or would that be "pissing" on the Greyhawk Wars and the subsequent works after that? Because, honestly, that's the version of Oerth I'd want, with no desire to piss on anyone or anything.

 

[Charlaquin]

Alright, I’m on page 13 and I just can’t wait another 10 pages to get this out:

The question no one seems to be asking (so far as I’ve read) is: canon to what exactly? It’s not like WotC has decreed that Salvatore’s novels No Longer Count. He can keep writing them, and I’m sure he’ll keep their continuity intact. It’s just that what happens in them doesn’t have to have an impact on the game, and vice versa. The two canons (inasmuch as a “game canon” can even be said to exist) can exist in parallel without new developments in one having to impact the other.

 

[Parmandur]

Does it, though? My Greyhawk, no fooling, came in a folder. The boxed sets after that kind of ruined it, in my mind. Am I beholden to those later works, some of which explicitly attempted to wreck the setting to make it more "interesting?" I definitely don't think any of the Greyhawk novels, including Gygax's, are canon for my game, should I return to Oerth.

Am I required to use everything that's been done for Greyhawk? Do I need to pretend that I love Gargoyle or The Five Shall Be as One the way I love the Village of Homlett?

And if WotC publishes a new World of Greyhawk (which I would bet against ever happening), would they be allowed to publish a version that simulates the game as it was played in 1979? Or would that be "pissing" on the Greyhawk Wars and the subsequent works after that? Because, honestly, that's the version of Oerth I'd want, with no desire to piss on anyone or anything.

They did reboot Greyhawk to the original set for Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Salvatore’s novels No Longer Count

I'm pretty sure that the amount of Salvatore novels became Countless more than a decade ago.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They did reboot Greyhawk to the original set for Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

I am a folder traditionalist! Too much fiddly detail in the boxed set for me. (Seriously, Gygax, very few people care that much about what weapons fictional armies carried and in what numbers.)

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Alright, I’m on page 13 and I just can’t wait another 10 pages to get this out:

The question no one seems to be asking (so far as I’ve read) is: canon to what exactly? It’s not like WotC has decreed that Salvatore’s novels No Longer Count. He can keep writing them, and I’m sure he’ll keep their continuity intact. It’s just that what happens in them doesn’t have to have an impact on the game, and vice versa. The two canons (inasmuch as a “game canon” can even be said to exist) can exist in parallel without new developments in one having to impact the other.

Stop making sense and being reasonable,

we're all mad here, and you must be,
or you wouldn't have come here.

 

[Parmandur]

I am a folder traditionalist! Too much fiddly detail in the boxed set for me. (Seriously, Gygax, very few people care that much about what weapons fictional armies carried and in what numbers.)

I mean, I kind of like that stuff.

 

[Charlaquin]

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).

I know this is super tangential to the actual topic, but I just wanted to point out that, no, White Wolf didn’t buy back the original WoD setting. A lot of the talent from the original White Wolf spun off into a new company called Onyx Path, which licensed the publishing rights for the tabletop version of both settings (as well as Exalted, though IIRC they actually did buy that one and Scarred Lands). Then in 2015 Paradox Entertainment bought the rights for both settings and the White Wolf name and logo from Crowd Control Productions and started a new White Wolf. They continued to license new World of Darkness to Onyx Path (though they forced them to change the name to Chronicles of Darkness and acted like us CofD fans should be grateful they didn’t just ice the IP) but took classic World of Darkness in-house. And made a bunch of PR snaffus along the way. Also Onyx Path has nearly been Ship of Theseus’d since all that went down. The story of “White Wolf” is almost as convoluted and riddled with bigotry as that of TSR.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm pretty sure that the amount of Salvatore novels became Countless more than a decade ago.

Bravo! 10/10!