Your Thoughts on DND Cannon

[Amdy_vill]

Legitimacy of canon is a necessary precondition. You haven't established that there is a canon, much less that novels, games, or other things have any bearing on it. Heck, you've not even defined what you mean by canon.

Discussing something that, in my opinion, does not and cannot exist is pointless. So there's a threshold question. Does it exist? Can it exist? Does such a thing even have meaning in the context of a TTRPG? Of this particular one?

now that I am actually digging into this I think you have more of a point. we should first focus on define a baseline for canon. at least an island for this is defined canon.

[micahaphone]

I'm starting to get confused about what the topic is supposed to be, but I will use the Forgotten Realms Wiki when I don't have any ideas for a deity or other lore spot, and I freely ignore it when I have ideas that work better for my game.

Generally speaking I'm a bottoms-up worldbuilder, so I care a lot more about what's in a town/city and who the players might interact with. Defining what gods exist or what far off countries exist is usually left for "later" aka "when it suddenly comes up in game".

I'll ask OP, what's the goal of this thread? I just noticed that you editing the first post to say you're not looking to discuss what is or isn't canon, more how to determine canon. And I feel like there isn't a canon. There's oodles of ideas out there, take what you want. Maybe some of it got retconned later, well you can skip that bit. Unless you're playing in AL I don't see why there should be anything that's canonical, and I hear that AL has little to no RP or lore attached to it usually.

Like for example, I know wotc usually does some type of cataclysmic event between editions, like a "spellplague", whatever that was. I don't read official FR histories or anything and I personally don't like the idea of a spell plague, so I'll omit that entire concept from my campaign world. Maybe to me Orcus isn't a demon, but necromancy is more associated with an underworld plane of the dead, so he's more like a Hades style god, with focus on his ambition and jealousy of the other gods who got better domains than him.

[Devils_Advocate]

Amdy_vill, are you talking about things (events, characters, locations, items, etc.) that have been portrayed as part of the "D&D Multiverse" by Wizards of the Coast? Is that what you mean by "canon"?

I think that you may be missing a reason why respondents to this thread have been pointing out that the Dungeon Master gets to choose which setting lore to use. That's relevant because it means that no level of knowledge of lore is required. So "the canon" can't be too massive or difficult to navigate to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, because running D&D demands no particular level of engagement with "the canon".

It seems to me that the main reason to desire a comprehensive understanding of the entire body of official D&D lore is that one is a huge nerd who enjoys such things as ends in themselves. And a massive and convoluted body of lore seems better suited to that purpose than a small and simple one. So it's hard to see how "the canon" could be too big or too complicated. Too big for what? Too complicated for what? Why do you want it to be approachable?