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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

All that being said, it was still all part of the same continuity (except the Abrams stuff). The original story has continued, with the occasional interruption, for 55 years now. They broad strokes old stuff when it makes sense to, but it all more or less happened.

 

[JEB]

said it was actually in play all along

Minor point of order: In this particular case, it doesn't seem like Crawford suggested this was always their policy. And the 5E DMG, in 2014, outright said the official FR setting included novels and digital games (and strongly implied the novels were part of the other classic settings).

If he does later come out and imply this was always the plan, that'd be different; but he hasn't, as far as I know.

 

[Steampunkette]

Minor point of order: In this particular case, it doesn't seem like Crawford suggested this was always their policy. And the 5E DMG, in 2014, outright said the official FR setting included novels and digital games (and strongly implied the novels were part of the other classic settings).

If he does later come out and imply this was always the plan, that'd be different; but he hasn't, as far as I know.

Do you have a page citation for that? All I've been finding is "You can use old Forgotten Realms Novels for Inspiration" and similar phrasings.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Not all at once; but some people and many companies make ten-year plans and then every five years or so review those plans and push them out another five years.

Doesn't take much to add up to a 40-year plan when it's done that way.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

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.

Umm, we've had three Start Trek Movies recently that did EXACTLY that. Abramsverse Star Trek is exactly that.

The best thing Disney did was declare the EU to not be canon. Hrm, out of that you get The Mandalorian - which is pretty good by all accounts. Five (Six?) Star Wars movies that made fantastic amounts of money and also gave us the best Star Wars movie - Star Wars Rogue One, and also gave us Star Wars Rebels.

I'd say they did pretty well out of the deal.

 

[MGibster]

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'm genuinely confused here because I didn't mention anything about editorial rights. Perhaps it would be clearer if I said I had an emotional stake in Star Trek just as many people have an emotional stake in Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Final Fantasy. And yes, you're right to say that Trek has changed over the years. But TNG, DS9, and Voyager didn't go back and invalidate the original series. The fact that Klingons were allied with the Federation in TNG did not change that the Klingons and the Federation were enemies in the original series. There's a difference to changing a setting with the passage of time and simply declaring that the old material didn't happen.

 

[Chaosmancer]

He actually weighed in on that yesterday:

I think the author of the tweet is missing the lynch pin problem, to be honest. He mentions it, but then he kind of glosses over it.

And this is basically what Wizards has said. If it's not in an official 5e book, it ain't it. But they're already stacking problems again. How? Well, there's no canonical endings to their campaigns, and they're keeping FR a "live time" world, meaning all the events in the campaign books are world canonical, and even though they have potentially world shaking implications, we don't know how they ended.

To really and truly have a canon in a living world, you need to have canonical endings to events. And we have a few kind of things like that, but for the most part I'd say DnD is in a very hard position.

On one hand, you can't tell the players that their experience "doesn't count". I mean, imagine how it would go if to play Storm King's Thunder you had to say that Zhentarim agents stole most of the treasure from Tiamat's horde, leaving the Lord's Alliance nearly penniless. And then Storm King's Thunder meant that the Emerald Enclave was shattered, so that when Out of the Abyss came then there were no forces of good to aid you... a thing that might not be true in a campaign where the players laid claim to large swathes of the treasure and founded a new force for good that also has an alliance with the King of the Storm Giants allowing you to recruit the Stone Giants to fight the Demons.

Eventually, as the AP's came out, more and more people would have less and less reason to run them, because they are assuming "canonical" events that didn't happen for those tables.


But, on the other hand... it leads straight into what this guy is saying. A lack of the use of the lore, and a lack of weight to the events, because oh my dear lord a Dragon apocalypse, Giant Apocalypse and Demon Lord Super Apocalypse all happening within three years of each other would be beyond devastating, but they have no impact on the world at all.

Which poison pill do you want?

 

[MGibster]

Umm, we've had three Start Trek Movies recently that did EXACTLY that. Abramsverse Star Trek is exactly that.

I didn't feel the need to mention the movies because we all know they're in a different timeline/universe. The point is that each Trek series didn't invalidate what had come before it.

The best thing Disney did was declare the EU to not be canon. Hrm, out of that you get The Mandalorian - which is pretty good by all accounts. Five (Six?) Star Wars movies that made fantastic amounts of money and also gave us the best Star Wars movie - Star Wars Rogue One, and also gave us Star Wars Rebels.

I had no attachment to the EU beyond the Thrawn books and a few others because most of it was crap. But despite my feelings as to the quality of the EU, I can certainly understand why people were upset when it was jettisoned. Either fictions matters or it doesn't. If fiction matters enough for us to form emotional attachments to it then you can hardly be surprised when people get upset when canon is changed.

 

[Ibrandul]

Minor point of order: In this particular case, it doesn't seem like Crawford suggested this was always their policy. And the 5E DMG, in 2014, outright said the official FR setting included novels and digital games (and strongly implied the novels were part of the other classic settings).

If he does later come out and imply this was always the plan, that'd be different; but he hasn't, as far as I know.

You're right—I may have read his statement too hastily. "For many years" appears more likely to apply to the first major clause of the sentence (about the team considering the novels etc. to be "wonderful expressions"), but not the second (about noncanonicity).

 

[JEB]

Do you have a page citation for that? All I've been finding is "You can use old Forgotten Realms Novels for Inspiration" and similar phrasings.

DMG, page 4:

Even if you're using an established world such as the Forgotten Realms, your campaign takes place in a sort of mirror universe of the official setting where Forgotten Realms novels, game products, and digital games are assumed to take place.

The "Flavors of Fantasy" section (pages 38-41), for what it's worth, also describes Athas "as featured in numerous Dark Sun novels and game products", and points to the novels when referencing the other settings.