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.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Marvel TV (prior to Disney+) respected the MCU, but the MCU never reflected the events of the TV shows.

Doctor Who TV has never treated the Target novels, comics or even Big Finish audios as cannon, except as Easter eggs or inspiration.

George Lucas gave no cares about the EU when designing the prequels, which is why the Rule of Two, Jedi marriage and C3P0's origins in the older novels and comics got hastily retconned.

It can happen. It DOES happen. Primary sources often take priority over supplemental. D&D is no different.

The novels were never supplemental.

 

[Bolares]

I would be fine with a Dragonlance setting book taking place immediately after Legends. Much like what was done with Dark Sun back in the day. I am extremely skeptical we'll get that, however. It's far more likely they'll start from scratch before the War of the Lance so they can make more sweeping changes. That's why I'm glad the Draonlance Nexus put out their book before WotC had the chance. That, and the 3rd ed Draonlance books, are all I need.

Would you be able to look at this changes at face value? Or the loss of prior lore would be too much? I ask because if the same would happen to Eberron I don't know how I would feel.

 

[Bolares]

The novels were never supplemental.

well... since 2014 they are

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

When you ask people about Krynn and Dragonlance, yeah, there's a whole lot of canon-ignoring by fans already happening there.

I know I'm one of those folks that continually hopes that any given tease from Wizards hints at Dragonlance's return, but I want to believe that this statement has something to do with Dragonlance.

Dragonlance is an interesting example, because the novels long ago smashed everything that made it Dragonlance. "Dragons of Summer Flame" was written as an ending to the entire thing: Three moons turned into one, the whole pantheon departed, the ancient conflicts of the setting more or less concluded.

As a grand finale to the novel series, it was decent. Maybe not the way I'd have chosen to wrap things up, but it got the job done. But it did no favors to anybody wanting to play a game on Krynn! If you read the Dragonlance novels and then sit down to play a game, you want clerics of Paladine and wizards of the three moons and battles against the dragonarmies--not "Oh, that's all gone now, have some generic D&D fantasy."

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

On the subject of Dragonlance:

If The One Ring is able to manage making a game set in a massive canon, with enough space for players to adventure and influence the world without stumbling on said canon, I think Dragonlance should manage.

Agreed, the official canon of DL is pretty convoluted, but it is still far from being Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

BUT

I think settings such as DL or DS, those with possibly major restrictions on the basic 5e PHB, should get the same treatment as AiME, meaning receiving their own, adapted PHB.

 

[Keldryn]

And it's not like they haven't done this before. This is directly from the 4th Edition Dark Sun Campaign Setting book. And what they say here is what I'm assuming they will be doing with any of the classic settings they'll be releasing.

Dark Sun 4e and Eberron represent my preferred model for all campaign settings. When a setting is published for a new edition of the D&D rules, start with the core ideas and history of the world and then re-imagine it and tweak for modern sensibilities (if necessary). Convoluted in-universe explanations for rules changes or additions have always rubbed me the wrong way. Unless you're converting editions mid-campaign, I fail to see the need for doing this anyway. I suspect that the number of campaigns which span multiple editions of D&D is a vanishingly small percentage of them.

A campaign setting is a game product first and foremost, and it should be designed to facilitate gameplay at the table. There's no reason why a line of fiction set in that world couldn't peacefully co-exist. The Avatar Trilogy set a terrible precedent, IMO.

The part of this I always find morbidly fascinating is when people invent and tell each other stories about how people currently at WotC hate, despise, and otherwise dislike all the stuff from before their time, and then I tab over to social media to look at the feed of friends and acquaintances at WotC, Paizo, Green Ronin, and other local companies and find write-ups of their latest campaigns using AD&D 1st and 2nd editions (and some using earlier versions of D&D), in a mix of home-brew and old published settings. I'd have to do a careful tally over several months to be sure, but I am reasonably confident that many people working at those companies are, at a minimum, about as likely to use old stuff as current for their personal play.

Just another attempt at gatekeeping. I don't like their current offerings, therefore the creators hate and disrespect what came before, or they just pain don't understand it. (I understand it better than anyone, of course. Even the original creator, if I don't like what their new stuff.) Which, of course, leads very quickly to people who do like have less refined tastes than I do (or are mindless sheep, accepting whatever garbage has the official branding on it).

So yeah, very reminiscent of the whole Star Wars situation over the past few years. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson aren't fans and hate Star Wars. So does Kathleen Kennedy (you know, a longtime close friend of Lucas whom he personally chose to take over the company when he retired). Rian Johnson hates Star Wars so much that he chose UCS film school just because that's where George Lucas went!

But Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are the good guys. They're true fans and they're the ones keeping the true spirit of Star Wars alive and faithful to George Lucas' creative vision. But they're fighting Kathleen Kennedy and her evil corporate overlords at Disney every step of the way!

It's a ridiculous narrative.

 

[Deset Gled]

So you're saying the novels should respect and represent the game (which is great!) but that the game doesn't have to respect and represent the novels?

My point is they need to respect and represent each other equally, where they can.

Why? Because while some people come to the novels via first playing the game, others come to the game via first reading the novels. Moving in one of these directions should not be less "valid" than moving in the other direction.

I don't know if Bolares was saying that, but I'm saying that. As other have given examples of, there are many franchises where one set of media basically drives the ship, and the others all follow. For D&D, it makes sense that the game drives the ship.

I will, however, also note and respect that this is a fundamental change is business strategies from earlier incarnations of D&D. TSR was a publishing company for a majority of it's run, not just an RPG company. They made money (and eventually killed themselves) by flooding the market with books and content of all sorts. It makes sense that they would treat some of their most financially successful lines (i.e. Dragonlance novels) as a primary source. They intentionally intertwined the game and the novels when they thought that it would increase sales. And since they were often financially strapped, they would have no qualms about tying one into the other for a short term sales boost, even if it made the stories more complicated down the road.

Hasbro also isn't an RPG company. They're a brand management company. And, for better or worse, part of their long term strategy has been keeping the base D&D brand to be a more "general purpose" fantasy setting. This is clearly done on purpose, and is part of their plan to have fewer edition reboots and appeal to the widest market. From that perspective, it makes complete and total sense to have the core game be as flexible (alternatively: generic) as possible. Obviously, its harder for the game to follow these tenets if the game obligated to follow other media. And since they're more focused on long term brand life than day-to-day sales, the long term cost of maintaining story threads tied to other media isn't worth the immediate payoff given by a cross-media sales boost.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Would you be able to look at this changes at face value? Or the loss of prior lore would be too much? I ask because if the same would happen to Eberron I don't know how I would feel.

I'm not sure, but I'm leaning toward it being too much. Quite frankly, Dragonlance was formative for me. War of the Twins was the second full-length novel I ever read, after the Hobbit. My dad found it used and got it for me, not realizing it was book 2 of a trilogy. I was fascinated, and devoured everything Dragonlance (and broader fantasy) I could find for a long time. The changes I feel WotC would make to the setting would likely be more than I could bear for Dragonlance.

 

[Deset Gled]

JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson aren't fans and hate Star Wars. So does Kathleen Kennedy (you know, a longtime close friend of Lucas whom he personally chose to take over the company when he retired). Rian Johnson hates Star Wars so much that he chose UCS film school just because that's where George Lucas went!

But Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are the good guys. They're true fans and they're the ones keeping the true spirit of Star Wars alive and faithful to George Lucas' creative vision. But they're fighting Kathleen Kennedy and her evil corporate overlords at Disney every step of the way!

If the internet has taught me anything, it's that the biggest Star Wars fans are also the ones who hate Star Wars the most.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

What WW did was somewhat different. They had a relatively new setting that they were trying to propel forwards with adventure-related metaplots. However they did provide ridiculously rich and in-depth setting lore, and books and books and books of it, and that was very successful - I knew loads of people who had VtM books they never used mechanically or even really in writing campaigns, just because they wanted to read the lore. And when the did try and do a reboot/remake, things did not go well for them financially, see the nWoD, which I liked some of the ideas of, and loathed others, personally. The issue with the adventure metaplot was more that they forced the pace than anything else, and much as some people complained about it, whilst they were pushing it, WW did pretty well. Only when they crashed it into the wall of the actual apocalypse and rebooted did things go truly awry (Revised didn't help though, it was a tonal (no typo) reboot on two of their most popular lines, which didn't endear them to a lot of their fans).

I think you hit the nail on the head re: WoD's mistake. Like with doomsday cult leaders, you talk about the apocalypse for long enough, and at some point it has to either happen, or you're going to lose members. In their case they did the apocalypse and lost members.

It's a great lesson, though, for TTRPG settings. Either don't make doomsday a near-term thing, or make your doomsday-clock game explicitly short-lived and replayable.

But also, there's value in lore that has that sort of driving pace and thruline, that can make it at least as exciting as more general scene-setting lore. It's the difference between reading a graphic novel and an endless ongoing comic series. Despite the longevity of a lot of cape comic characters, there are people (like me) who will already gravitate towards the graphic novels, or any story that has a clear momentum and end-point.

Which all to say that on an intellectual level I get people being torn up about "losing" lore for settings that are built up over decades...I have a hard time sympathizing, since those also seem pretty static and uneventful and detached from any real narrative momentum. And as much as I loved and consumed and sorted through the original WoD setting, what did I care when they reset it? If I can a WoD/CoD/Vampire 5e game now I could just set it during that period, or mix and match it with some later material. Any truly great setting, imo, should probably self-destruct after a decade or two anyway. If it hasn't, maybe it's not so dynamic or interesting?