At a media press briefing last week, WotC's Jeremey Crawford clarified what is and is not canon for D&D.
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.
"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.
you saw a lot of previous stories get erased and a similar reaction. And before that, Crisis on Infinite Earths did the same. Superman was recognizable, but his world was irrevocably changed and for some people, particularly people that grew up Superman, that was a tough experience.
