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]

Sorry to be callous, but your generation's gonna die off eventually

Unless Gen Z knows something the rest of us don't, I'm pretty sure every generation dies eventually.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's not how many in-universe years of lore that is the issue, but rather how many words, or pages of lore. The Realms has got everybody beat on that count.

On word count? Probably.

On depth? I'd give Eberron a lot of credit. Baker has been continuing his lore on his blog for years, and his lore is tight. Things flow very naturally from one place to the other, and he has a lot of lore written for Khorvaire, Sarlona, Aernal, Xendrik, and the Oceans now. As well as multiple planes of existence.

None of which really leans on existing DnD lore. None of the major forces of evil are from general DnD lore. None of the races are left untouched and just on their default mode. And most of it is tightly tied into the stories of the regions and fits together very well.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Unless Gen Z knows something the rest of us don't, I'm pretty sure every generation dies eventually.

Well, we may be figuring it out:

 

[MGibster]

So, I really don't get the people who, when a company says "this old material is no longer canon" begin declaring that the stories they have loved for years are now trash. That everything is ruined and tarnished. I remember people declaring that those Star Wars EU books they had spent decades collecting and loving were going to be sold and tossed, because now they aren't "canon".

I don't think most of those people stop loving the material just because the owner says it's no longer canon but I can see why they're upset. As with everything in life, we can reference The Simpsons to illustrate a point. In 1997 an episode called "The Principal and the Pauper," it's revealed that the man we thought was Principal Seymour Skinner was actually Armin Tamzarian. The real Skinner was a POW in Vietnam and then worked in a Chinese sweatshop for twenty years before it was shut down and he was able to return home. In the meanwhile, Tamzarian had adopted Skinner's identity and of course everything returns to the status quo by the end of the episode. But the damage had been done.

Skinner was a character Simpsons fans had grown over the course of nine seasons as audiences got to know him. Harry Shearer, who voiced Skinner, says that after he read the script he told the writers "That's so wrong. You're taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we've done before with other characters. It's so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it's disrespectful to the audience." It remains a fairly divisive episode with many Simpsons fans hating it.

Now I happen to think that WotC has a good reason to declare everything before 2014 to be non-canon. They don't necessarily want players born in 2001 to feel as though they need to read or understand setting material that was first written fourteen years before they were born just to be able to follow the Forgotten Realms. I have no doubt that they also want the freedom going forward to shape their settings to the needs and desires of a contemporary audience. And just so we're clear, I think WotC is making the right decision here and I'm not criticizing it. But from the point of view of long term fans who have strong attachments to it I'm going to paraphrase Harry Shearer: You're taking something that an audience has built 25 or 30 years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can. It's disrespectful to the audience.

It's not a mystery to me why some people are upset and I empathize with them. But I also think WotC made the right decision for D&D.

 

[Faolyn]

because 1) that getting will get all the new lore and in time that lore will become an obstacle to new players. Establishing lore and unreliable in canon is a better long term strategy. Though that is what I think they are doing they have not confirmed that yet.

To be fair, it took decades for FR lore to build up to "obstacle" levels. If they did create a brand new setting, whether Points of Light or something more built up, it would take a long time before it got to be unwieldy. And they could start out with pointers (maybe just for the setting's writers and not in the books) about what to do and what not to do, to help the lore from becoming unwieldy.

Will WotC do this? Almost certainly not. But they could.

 

[Autumnal]

I have a friend who's recently been quoting a trivia fact. Do you know which version of Dracula has the Vampire being shot by an American Cowboy? The Original Novel by Bram Stoker. Is Bela Lugosi's 1931 Dracula a lesser movie for changing the canon to not include Mr. Quincey Morris? Is the Original Bram Stoker novel lesser because most versions of Dracula no longer include the character?

This leads nicely into something I was thinking about tonight. Thanks, Chaosmancer. I re-watched the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Now, John Le Carré is one of my favorite authors, the George Smiley stories are my favorites of his, the original novel is maybe my single favorite of those. I'm also a huge fan of the BBC mini-series, which is an intensely faithful adaptation in myriad ways. The movie actually takes a bunch of liberties: it doesn't just condense and consolidate as a movie must, it introduces changes to many details and some larger elements. And yet it feels - to me and many others, to judge reviews - like a close reading and faithful rendering, in ways that would take a whole lot of space to usefully describing. I watch it and it feels like I'm seeing the story that was in the book.

The same is true in other cases as well. L.A. Confidential is maybe a particularly good example. The film literally drops half the book - there's an entire second plot line about a thinly veiled Disneyland and its development that's altogether gone - and makes significant changes to the half it keeps. But again, you (or at least I) watch the movie and it feels that you got the story.

Which is to say that legacy is weird and complicated, and that while fidelity to the data that comprise a piece of legacy is a thing to consider, it's really far from the only thing, and overriding it may well lead to work that feels closer because of how the new work as a whole goes about its job.

 

[Scribe]

Excessive lore that is still considered canon for the purpose of the world's lore does not help (and thus is a detriment to) new DMs.

No, you choose to make it a detriment of you wish.

Your table, your game, your choice.

As it was before this declaration, and is now.

Only you got to choose if it applied to you. Not me.

Now, it's non canon for everyone, yay progress.

 

[a.everett1287]

No, you choose to make it a detriment of you wish.

Your table, your game, your choice.

As it was before this declaration, and is now.

Only you got to choose if it applied to you. Not me.

Now, it's non canon for everyone, yay progress.

Score one for progress.

 

[Hussar]

A recent back and forth in the [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threa...and-why.681490/']PC Races the DM has Excluded thread made me want to go up and give Crawford a great big kiss. In that thread, a poster was waxing at length about how Aarocockra should not be a PC race. Only thing is, the poster was quoting material from more than twenty years ago that isn't true in 5e. Virtually nothing that was posted applies to 5e. And the only way I would know the older stuff is if I did a deep dive into lore - we're talking some seriously fringe products here.[/URL]
So, yeah, count me as totally on board when WotC cuts the canon strings. Fantastic. It makes those kinds of conversations so much simpler. No, this race is not like that. At least not in 5e. End of discussion.
Great.

 

[Scribe]

Score one for progress.

Nobody gained.
A certain segment, no matter how small, lost.

So either spitefulness, leads one to think anything improved, or no, there is no progress.

Just like a few other things that literally every table and DM could solve for themselves, Wizards has to to seemingly take away (spite) some, for the sake of....nobody.

No surprise at this point how people can cheer for a change that subtracts joy from others, I've seen it multiple times here.

Like that post about PC lineages right there.

Your table has them? Great.

Mine maybe doesn't, and you don't need canon to say so.

'Nah, nothing beyond the PHB' or 'No Fly' or 'No Drow.'

Simple.