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.

 

[Mirtek]

ah, okay then. I've started playing from 3e... Just assumed what the poster said was true.

They even explained in a novel when they later did away with this rule and drow items no longer disintegrated on the surface

 

[DariusArgent]

Do you have evidence for this?

Ask anyone who started playing D&D with 5E what they know about Faerun. Then ask them what they know about Exandria.

 

[Mirtek]

And I've no idea what the excuse for changing the Great Wheel into the World Tree was.

There's wasn't really one. Die Vecna, Die! was cited as sort of reason but truth to be told, the FR story just ignored it. Before Bane's realm was just a limited area located withing the greater plane of Gehenna, after it was supposedly it's own entire plane.

But when an FR novel during that time needed to go there, it just tiptoed around the issue by the characters just doing there stuff withing Bane's realm so whether it had a border and the greater plane of Gehenna was beyong that border or whether it was it's own infinite plane - it didn't matter the the story and continuity.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

the SCAG isn't enough as the excuse not to do a proper setting?

What do you think constitutes a proper setting?

What do you think the purpose of a setting book is?

 

[Hexmage-EN]

And I've no idea what the excuse for changing the Great Wheel into the World Tree was.

The neat thing is that, while the World Tree cosmology is usually said to be the cosmology of the 3E Forgotten Realms, Player's Guide to Faerun states that the setting is actually linked to multiple cosmologies, with the World Tree being specifically the cosmology of Faerun.

The geographic regions on Toril of Maztica and Zakhara were linked to their own Astral Planes with unique sets of planes and gods, and Kara-Tur had a Spirit World coterminous with the region.

So the Forgotten Realms went from being part of the Astral Plane of the Great Wheel in 2E to effectively being an independent hub that connected three separate Astral Planes with unique sets of Outer Planes and gods, as well as a Spirit World, in 3E.

 

[thundershot]

Then there’s folks like me who have the City of Greyhawk, Waterdeep, and the Isle of Dread all on the same world. I prefer to piecemeal things from the settings and adventures to create my own world. I appropriately call my setting Amalgam. So the canon doesn’t mean anything to my game.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Ask anyone who started playing D&D with 5E what they know about Faerun. Then ask them what they know about Exandria.

The funny thing is that WotC doesn't even own Exandria. It also has a number of elements that contradict official 5E canon.

For example, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes established the Raven Queen as not being a goddess and having become what she is through a failed attempt to rise to divinity, while Critical Role uses the 4E lore that the Raven Queen was a mortal mage who definitely killed the previous god of the dead and is herself a god through taking his power (further, Critical Role adds that her revealing to the world that killing gods to take their divine spark and become one led to another mage trying to copy her and accidentally unleashing all the previously-imprisoned evil gods on the Material Plane). There's also the fact that in Critical Role, the leader of the Seelie Court in the Feywild is Warqueen Elmenore the Unforgiving rather than Titania the Summer Queen. These details contradict 5E's stance that there is only one Feywild and one Shadowfell that all settings share.

I think it's telling that the new Critical Role setting book is being self-published rather than being published by WotC like the previous one was. I believe it's so that Matt Mercer can have complete control over his campaign setting and avoid being in a situation like Keith Baker's, where the campaign setting he created and is still passionate about is owned by WotC and his own products elaborating on Eberron lore officially are non-canonical.

 

[jasper]

......
I'll also be surprised if the Forgotten Realms gets a major reboot in this likely setting guide....

No More Reboots. No more Reboots. That is too hard. How about a resandal. Or Reflip flog. Or Rehouse slipper. REBOOTS ARE BAD and you are Muddying up the carpet.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

The funny thing is that WotC doesn't even own Exandria. It also has a number of elements that contradict official 5E canon.

For example, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes established the Raven Queen as not being a goddess and having become what she is through a failed attempt to rise to divinity, while Critical Role uses the 4E lore that the Raven Queen was a mortal mage who definitely killed the previous god of the dead and is herself a god through taking his power (further, Critical Role adds that her revealing to the world that killing gods to take their divine spark and become one led to another mage trying to copy her and accidentally unleashing all the previously-imprisoned evil gods on the Material Plane). There's also the fact that in Critical Role, the leader of the Seelie Court in the Feywild is Warqueen Elmenore the Unforgiving rather than Titania the Summer Queen. These details contradict 5E's stance that there is only one Feywild and one Shadowfell that all settings share.

I think it's telling that the new Critical Role setting book is being self-published rather than being published by WotC like the previous one was. I believe it's so that Matt Mercer can have complete control over his campaign setting and avoid being in a situation like Keith Baker's, where the campaign setting he created and is still passionate about is owned by WotC and his own products elaborating on Eberron lore officially are non-canonical.

The thing I have to ask is:

How many fans even know about these differences? And among those who know, how many of them strongly care? Maybe the most obsessive Critters do care, but from what I've seen, less hardcore CR fans seem just as willing as your average Millenial/Gen-Z new D&D player to stripmine stuff from Exandria to use in their own worlds as they would for any other setting.

 

[Dire Bare]

Because they are available via print on demand/pdf download and they present it as a option for folks that want to branch out into geographic areas of FR WotC has not published in the 5e era. They are still pulling inspiration from the broad swaths of TSR/WotC published FR sources when they do publish something set in the Forgotten Realms, but they are not beholden to it. That is a subtle distinction.


I am baffled by this assertion. They have said that the current publishing format is to make an adventure set somewhere in the Forgotten Realms and that they are not going to do another guide like Sword Coast. In fact, Ravenloft was the first of three older non-FR campaign settings they have been working on. So, no there is no confirmation that an FR campaign setting is coming out.

I am a big fan of The World of Greyhawk (I have been running it since 1980 when the original folio came out and I run of the larger Greyhawk themed Facebook Groups). I have lived through the multiple versions of the campaign that have been published. I would love to see a Greyhawk specific adventure or even a campaign setting (because it would open the campaign up to the DMs Guild).

But guess what, you and I are not the target demo for WotC. We are not the ones driving the record profits and sales success that is 5e. If you are Gen X like me, we are just too small a group to cater to. There is a massive Millennial market that is discovering D&D and their culture references for fantasy RPGs are way broader than the ones we grew up with. The stuff that lands for us just isn’t going to cut it for them. A massive wall of published material is not going to be seen as a welcoming to new players (and as has already been said here, not everything is available still).

You got a few choices here. You can continue to lament that WotC is not catering directly to you and be angry about it, casting dispersions on the WotC designers, Or you can continue to play with the material you got staying in an older system or adapting it to your 5e game with your personal gaming group (hermetically sealed away from the rest of us), Or you can see the massive opportunity presented by a dynamic and growing audience where you find new people to play with and use your extensive understanding of FR to fill in the blanks left by WotC (the win, win).

I am going to go with the last option for my beloved Greyhawk. I want more people to play with. I am willing to deal with changes to the campaign because I know that whatever they publish I will be able to bring to bear my knowledge of Greyhawk lore and transform some of it into active story moments with my players. And that brings me to my final point…

Lore, is the lonely fun that we can sit down and read, argue about, and research forever. However all that lore means nothing if it does not engage with the players at my table. Lore is static by nature, story is dramatic and moves. So, does your campaign serve the player’s and their character’s stories or does it serve the lore you so love?

I know the answer at my table.

I'm not convinced that the Gen-X demographic is unimportant to WotC . . . we're just not the only demographic being catered to anymore, so it sometimes feels like we're being left behind. Welcome to getting old, I suppose! And I'm also not convinced that the majority of Gen-X gamers are opposed to the changes announced in recent weeks (focus on diversity, removal of problematic elements, less focus on maintaining canon, shorter adventure chunks) . . . a lot of us are fully on board and celebrate the changes to the game.

In fact, I have Gen-X friends who never played D&D as kids . . . but are now curious to try! And once you get a taste . . . .