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.

 

[jdrakeh]

Hence my use of the phrase, at the time.

At the end, when all of the unsold novels were returned . . . was it because the novels weren't selling as well anymore, or because they had been overprinted? And was it the inclusion of novels as integral to the D&D franchise that was the problem, or was it the crappy deal with Random House?

The same goes for another aspect that gamers tend to blame TSR's demise on, the Dragon Dice game. Was the actual game a mistake? The award-winning design? Or was it the overproduction of the game, resulting in unsold overstock in warehouses?

The biggest factor in their demise outside of the bad book and electronic games deals was, by all accounts, the plethora of different settings published for AD&D which were effectively competing with each other for shelf space in the retail market. Some products (the Planescape campaign setting box set is specifically mentioned in a few places) were actually sold at a loss. So, yes, there were other factors involved (and I never claimed there weren't), but denying that the reliance on tie-ins with fiction (which was a failing market for them by 1996) and electronic games (a licensing deal which they effectively screwed themselves out of) weren't significant factors in the company's demise is to ignore recorded history (from many sources).

 

[Dire Bare]

The biggest factor in their demise outside of the bad book and electronic games deals was, by all accounts, the plethora of different settings published for AD&D which were effectively competing with each other for shelf space in the retail market. Some products (the Planescape campaign setting box set is specifically mentioned in a few places) were actually sold at a loss. So, yes, there were other factors involved (and I never claimed there weren't), but denying that the reliance on tie-ins with fiction (which was a failing market for them by 1996) and electronic games (a licensing deal which they effectively screwed themselves out of) weren't significant factors in the company's demise is to ignore recorded history (from many sources).

I'm probably not making my point very clear, sorry. Either way you look at, the issue with novels was one of many problems TSR had, not trying to insinuate you meant otherwise.

Was the problems the novels themselves? With the lesson learned, don't ever do novels again! They sunk D&D!

Or was the problem the crappy business decisions surrounding the novels? With the lesson learned, novels can be a profitable part of the franchise, but do a better job listening to your market and don't oversaturate.

If it was for a time measured in decades the measurement is 1. The first Forgotten Realms novel appears to be 1987 (with Dragonlance starting in 1984 and Gord the Rogue in 1985) and TSR was dead a decade later.

But given Realms novels kept coming even after WotC took over it appears to be TSR's management that was the problem.

Yeah, this is the point I'm trying, poorly, to make.

 

[TheSword]

The biggest factor in their demise outside of the bad book and electronic games deals was, by all accounts, the plethora of different settings published for AD&D which were effectively competing with each other for shelf space in the retail market. Some products (the Planescape campaign setting box set is specifically mentioned in a few places) were actually sold at a loss. So, yes, there were other factors involved (and I never claimed there weren't), but denying that the reliance on tie-ins with fiction (which was a failing market for them by 1996) and electronic games (a licensing deal which they effectively screwed themselves out of) weren't significant factors in the company's demise is to ignore recorded history (from many sources).

Selling a product at a loss is a production issue. Not an issue with the information contained within it.

As was stated in the 2016 survey recently quoted, Planescape was one of the five top tier popularity settings. Along with Eberron, FR, Dark Sun and Ravenloft. With Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Spelljammer as tier 2 popularity settings.

Whatever the production costs of the Planescape campaign setting it wasn’t the content that made it unprofitable.

 

[Yaarel]

Is it possible for Forgotten Realms fans to create two FR wikis, one for official 5e rulebooks and one for novels and shows?

It seems like keeping track of the difference would be useful, and DMs can peruse both for inspiration.

 

[Lanefan]

It's far from obvious to me that this is the case, particularly since I can point at big obvious counter-examples: the Marvel and DC universes. They've got comics, live-action movies, animated movies, live-action TV shows, and animated TV shows which don't at all sync up, and yet they're widely popular.

My exposure to those franchises are the movies (throughout) and a few of the TV series (for a while); and the only TV series I paid any real attention to was early-days Agents of Shield, because it was synched with the movies; and Agent Carter because it was great. A-of-S drifted badly in its later seasons, and I drifted away.

And I can sit somewhere folks are chatting about them and find that the public at large seems pretty okay with the whole concept of "this is one version, that's another, yonder is a third, and we don't expect them to line up". Having written game books and tie-in novels, I know that even when you've got a single brain - mine, in this case - handling related material in what amount to two different media, priorities diverge early and often. On big, long-time projects, much more so. And, well, it's not obvious to me as well that there are any substantial benefits to the general public in aiming for 100% congruence.

There's a difference, though. With the examples you're giving, the end-user is nothing more than a consumer: we watch or read whatever is produced for us, and hope it's any good.

With an RPG, however, we (particularly DMs) are more than just consumers. We're also producers, taking the raw material we're given - the game books, the setting guides, etc. - and trying to make a coherent setting and-or game out of it for our own table. As such, I think that allows us a certain degree of expectation of consistency within the sum of that raw material past and present; along with consistency when the raw material producers also use (or license) that same raw material to produce things based on it e.g. video games, books, movies, etc.

Flip side of this is that the raw material producers need to pay attention to what their own end-users, be they in-house or licensed - are producing, and if something new* comes out of that, adopt it into the raw material going forward.

* - and before anyone says "what if the new thing isn't consistent with the existing raw material", such errors, one hopes, are getting cut off at Editor's Pass.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We should remember the main WotC's goal for D&D is the digital market, the videogames.

Other reason for a reboot of all the settings is the players know the plot. How can you play again the Dragonlance modules when the novels have been read totally? The surprise is impossible.

I don't reject the idea of reboot, but my fear is any changes or retcons aren't wellcome because they are like a "jumping the shark" effect. Maybe I love the idea of Raitslin's daughter, a half-irda, as main character of a new trilogy, but after the develoment goes wrong when the author starts to use the plot preach us.

Teorically the parallel universes are possible in D&D, allowing creative freedom, for example a demiplane of the dread where both Ravenloft are possible, like the Schoringer's experiment with a cat within a box, but this is alive and dead simultanealy and very aggresive.

 

[Lanefan]

What do you think constitutes a proper setting?

Can't say, other than I know it when I see it.

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

To save me the year-or-more of work it takes to design my own setting.

 

[grimslade]

Is it possible for Forgotten Realms fans to create two FR wikis, one for official 5e rulebooks and one for novels and shows?

It seems like keeping track of the difference would be useful, and DMs can peruse both for inspiration.

I think the statement from Crawford is that the TTRPG will not be mandating anything canon from outside the 5E TTRPG products. I am sure the fiction line still has a bible, but since that stable of authors is currently Bob Salvatore and maybe Ed Greenwood. I don't think there is going to be much concern with canon there. There really is no fiction line with WotC anymore. The new Dragonlance trilogy was a licensed deal with Penguin(?) I think. Hasbro/WotC is not concerning itself with fiction anymore, mores the pity.

Rereading the Ryan Dancey post about the buyout of TSR, the problems of the fiction line was inconsistent quality and overprinting to puff up numbers. They also never depreciated any of their stock, so you had old 1E books late into 2E marked as full market value. I assume they balanced their books the same way with the fiction remainders that were returned. There is a market for D&D fiction, whether prose, video game, or comics. The questions are always how big is the market and is it profitable enough to warrant the staff to have a publishing unit? Hasbro/WotC eventually came to the conclusion that it was not worth the in-house cost to staff editors and marketing for books and now license stuff out sparingly.
I think that the D&D movie will determine the future of D&D fiction going forward. If it is a success, there will be lots of tie-in materials to start and perhaps an expansion. BGIII seems to be doing well enough to signal continued licensing deals for games. While Dark Alliance has made me think we will see the internal studios lower expectations until they produce a hit.

 

[Lanefan]

If it was for a time measured in decades the measurement is 1. The first Forgotten Realms novel appears to be 1987 (with Dragonlance starting in 1984 and Gord the Rogue in 1985) and TSR was dead a decade later.

Then the real start point is 1984, as those DL novels - particularly the first three - were huge sellers out of the gate. The FR novels took a year or two to build up any steam, but by 1990 or so they too were massive sellers.

That said, there was a distressingly wide variety of quality between those novels; and though we don't know which actual titles Random House returned in quantity to TSR my guess is that much of the bulk were some of the lower-quality entries into the field that - for good reason - just didn't sell.

But given Realms novels kept coming even after WotC took over it appears to be TSR's management that was the problem.

Indeed.

 

[Faolyn]

Is it possible for Forgotten Realms fans to create two FR wikis, one for official 5e rulebooks and one for novels and shows?

It seems like keeping track of the difference would be useful, and DMs can peruse both for inspiration.

If they want to. After all, Star Trek has Memory Alpha and Memory Beta for that exact same thing.