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.

 

[MGibster]

Can I ask in what way the announcement hurts you?

When discussions of representation or problematic issues come up regarding older material we're often told "fiction matters." And what they mean by this is that fiction can provide us with new and interesting points of view, it can teach us lessons we apply to the real world, it can comfort us, entertain us, and change our minds. We can have an emotional attachment to fiction. I'm used to be a big Star Trek fan (orthodox Trekkie), and I have an emotional attachment to the original series, the next generation, and Deep Space Nine. These shows mean something to me and to a lot of other people as well. I know it sounds silly, but here's a nice story about astronaut Ronald McNair for whom the original Star Trek was something he eagerly devoured as a teenager.

If fiction matters then it matters what people do with it. If a new Star Trek series were to come along and suddenly tell me everything from TOS was invalid it would piss me off. Eh, for a certain value of pissed. I'm an adult so it's not like I'm going to fly into a rage or anything but I'd definitely be unhappy. So I can understand why some people are unhappy with something they've invested in for many years is suddenly not canon. When Disney declared the extended universe to not be canon I was overwhelmed. It was as if hundreds of thousands of nerds suddenly cried out at once and were suddenly silenced.

Edit: And I say this as someone who doesn't mind if they change the lore. I just recognize that for those who have a connection to the lore it kind of sucks for them.

 

[JEB]

The ONLY impact declaring stuff non-canon has is when and if WotC decides to publish a new book/adventure/whatever, it forestalls any of the canon police showing up to decry how they've murdered the Realms with this or that change.

If Wizards really thinks this announcement is going to stop people from complaining about changes from past canon, they're fooling themselves. I can guarantee you'll still see complaints, every time.

About the only effect I can see is that you might convince a faction of canon fans to write off 5E material itself as non-canon, and stop buying... and even then, they might still make their displeasure known.

 

[Scott Christian]

I think the only problem with this is Crawford's phrasing. If he talked about the lore with the passion we know he has for it, and then stated how and why they decided it as non-canonical, then more older players would be on board. Instead, he came off sounding a bit glib. Which I am very doubtful is what he meant.

 

[Autumnal]

I've finally realized that this thread has been reminding me of a song, and which song it is. This is something that I pointed to a few times in the years we were writing revised clan books for Vampire: The Masquerade, and people wanted to know how much of the first edition ones would remain relevant and what to do with the early material we neither explicitly included nor explicitly dismissed. Not everyone was satisfied, to put it mildly, but really, this is a very good attitude to cultivate when it comes to broad, deep background across multiple editions.

You can wink at the Pharaoh
Dance with the Queen
Be nice to the nice guys and mean to the mean in your dreams
You can fence with a windmill
Surf in a seashell
Hide in a hotel

You can love one another or negotiate
You can love all the things that you manage to hate
You can tug on the heartstrings
Shrug 'til the phone rings
Or love 'til your heart stings

 

[Von Ether]

My bit of anecdotal evidence about older players and canon. Our GM put our next campaign up to a vote and FR was voted in. The fellow who was most adamant about the GM running FR brought in a whole milk crate of FR stuff, all of it 2e stuff even though the 3e book had been out for five years or so. He felt that he still hadn't gotten enough value out of his old stuff.

Based on that chat, I'm surprised WotC didn't chuck canon sooner.

 

[Deset Gled]

When a game generates a lot of lore, the creators have two choices. They can lean into it, leveraging the lore to their advantage, or they can keep piling lore up until the situation becomes so unwieldy that they have to hit the reset button, immediately causing fan upset and game instability. And I say instability because until they fill in the gaps, people will keep referring back to the old non-canonical lore to interpret things. We've seen it in Robotech , nuked so that only the shows and IDW comics were canon; Star Wars, with the infamous purging of the EU; and in DC, with its nonstop Crisis style events whenever the load gets too heavy. ...

Now, some might be asking, "What about option 1?" Well, we've seen it in action before. Two good examples are the OWoD and Heavy Gear universes. Both were very lore heavy, and featured live time worlds where events in prior books were referenced and where lore drove story.

I couldn't help but notice how horrible of examples this person picked. His examples of the "bad #2" option include two of the most profitable, longest running, and globally recognized multi-media franchises of all time. Also Robotech, which literally a story of completely broken and unmanageable lore from it's first English translations; you can't break canon that never existed.

Meanwhile, his choices for the "good #1" option are, with apologies to their fans, runner-ups in small races. Heavy Gear trails waaay behind WH40k. It looks like the new 3e rules are the first game publication in the series in about 5 years (you can download the PDF for free at DrivethruRPG right now), and they still rely on Kickstarter to get some of their minis made. WoD, was a second-place RPG 20 years ago, when RPGs were at their lowest market share ever. They've been sold half a dozen times. And the "O"WoD specifically is, well, the old part of the franchise; it's been replaced with the New. Neither of these have anywhere near the amount of lore D&D has accumulated over the years.

 

[Umbran]

And here's the rub: this is what happens when you make time-live worlds with deep lore without a plan to use it. It was avoidable.

I don't really think that's fair at all. Nobody makes 40-year plans. That's not a thing.

And it isn't like that lore hasn't been used. It has been in use constantly, over how many novels and game products? Come on.

 

[Ibrandul]

If Wizards really thinks this announcement is going to stop people from complaining about changes from past canon, they're fooling themselves. I can guarantee you'll still see complaints, every time.

About the only effect I can see is that you might convince a faction of canon fans to write off 5E material itself as non-canon, and stop buying... and even then, they might still make their displeasure known.

You just described every thread on Candlekeep.com in the last thirteen years.

I think the only problem with this is Crawford's phrasing. If he talked about the lore with the passion we know he has for it, and then stated how and why they decided it as non-canonical, then more older players would be on board. Instead, he came off sounding a bit glib. Which I am very doubtful is what he meant.

I find that to be a recurring problem with Crawford’s way of expressing himself. He’s precise in his choice of words, but also verbally frugal, to a fault. This can be admirable especially when crafting rules, which is his job after all—but I find that with certain rules in 5e and especially with his Sage Advice tweets, he really resists using any more words than he thinks are necessary, which unfortunately includes refraining from pointing out or clarifying how the rules interact with one another.

Practically every Sage Advice tweet thread he made starts out with him simply restating the rules someone is asking about, and only actually answering their question after another two or three rounds of the questioner saying “That just begs the question” and Crawford responding with tiny, incremental clarifications before (usually) finally answering the question, in a way that makes it sound like the answer all along was an obvious and immediate implication of the rules he initially quoted.

That’s relevant here because what he said is in a way similar: he announced a policy, said it was actually in play all along, and didn’t offer anything else that would contextualize the announcement for the people receiving it. (At least, I’m assuming he didn’t; we don’t actually have a transcript of the comments so far as I can tell, only brief quotations, so there might have been more.)

 

[Umbran]

If fiction matters then it matters what people do with it.

That seems a drastic mis-representation of that ideal.

Being a fan of a fiction does not give us editorial rights on it. Fans don't own creations. Fans are not entitled to have their favorite thing continue forever as they want it. For Trek fans, this becomes obvious because of how many ways they have changed Trek over the years. Each series is a significant departure from the previous ones.

 

[Steampunkette]

That seems a drastic mis-representation of that ideal.

Being a fan of a fiction does not give us editorial rights on it. Fans don't own creations. Fans are not entitled to have their favorite thing continue forever as they want it. For Trek fans, this becomes obvious because of how many ways they have changed Trek over the years. Each series is a significant departure from the previous ones.

I meeeeeeean...

You basically wind up with 4 Eras of Trek.

OG Era which includes the Cartoon and the first movies.

Next Gen, which includes the movies, DS9, and Voyager. DS9 was a significant stylistic and narrative departure, but it held the same canon and expanded it -beautifully-. While Voyager went back to the OG design of flying around finding things while trying to benefit from Farscape's "Long Way Home" framing device.

Then comes Enterprise and Abrams together in a "Re-imagining of the world"

And now Discovery/Picard in the "Hyper Focused Serialized Format" where you've got X number of Episodes to tell one overarching story with minimal digression, even into B or C plots within a given episode.

I'd agree that the Eras are significant departures, but you had 3 incredibly similar series on the air in the 80s/90s. Even if their narrative format changed (With DS9 going for longer metaplots) it was still the Trekiest Trek that ever did Trek.