D&D 5E Latest D&D Errata: Drow, Alignment, & More

Sage Advice is a series of articles in which Jeremy Crawford, one of the D&D Studio’s game design architects, talks about the design of the game’s rules and answers questions about them.

Book Updates | Sage Advice | Dungeons & Dragons

This Sage Advice provides updates and errata for a number of books, as well as answers to rules questions.

dnd.wizards.com

D&D books occasionally receive corrections and other updates to their rules and story. This Sage Advice installment presents updates to several books. I then answer a handful of rules questions, focusing on queries related to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons and Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

Official errata has been published for the following books:

• Curse of Strahd
• Dungeon Master’s Guide
• Player’s Handbook
• Storm King’s Thunder
• Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
• Tales from the Yawning Portal
• Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
• Tomb of Annihilation
• Volo’s Guide to Monsters

Here's some of the highlights.

• Alignment is removed from the Racial Traits section of races.
• Drow have undergone lore changes which reflect the different types of drow. The 'darkness of the drow' sidebar which portrays them as only evil has been removed.
• Storm King's Thunder alters references to 'Savage Frontier' and 'barbarians'; Curse of Strahd alters references to the Vistani.
• The controversial Silvery Barbs spell has been clarified.

As a drow, you are infused with the magic of the Underdark, an underground realm of wonders and horrors rarely seen on the surface above. You are at home in shadows and, thanks to your innate magic, learn to con- jure forth both light and darkness. Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues.

The cult of the god Lolth, Queen of Spiders, has cor- rupted some of the oldest drow cities, especially in the worlds of Oerth and Toril. Eberron, Krynn, and other realms have escaped the cult’s influence—for now. Wherever the cult lurks, drow heroes stand on the front lines in the war against it, seeking to sunder Lolth’s web.

 

[Krachek]

There were good Drow before the new lore. WotC seems to have forgotten the Elistree worshipers when they made 2 whole new surface Drow societies.

Most content creators and DMs don’t get stuck by a keyword in a monster template.
Indeed DnD is already fill With intelligent orc, good Drow and noble Vistanis.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You know... I might suggest that if you want your character to be different than any others from your Race, or your Class, or your Background, your Alignment, your Size, your Ability Scores etc. etc. etc...

...maybe you should just roleplay the character differently, rather than expect a half-dozen minor game mechanics to try and do it for you? Sounds crazy I know... but I suspect even if a party had two Chaotic Good Outlander Elf Rangers with 16 Dexterities in them, they might actually still be completely different characters based upon how they got roleplayed by their respective players.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If they're going to seriously move away from orcs usually being evil WotC needs to do work to give them an identity beyond that instead of just saying "not all orcs". Most of their identity comes from Gruumsh and the other orc gods. When minotaurs were made a playable race in 4E a good deal of support was given to describing what minotaurs who don't worship Baphomet are like, including describing what alternative gods were most often worshipped. This was aided by 4E deemphasizing racial pantheons and making gods formerly associated with specific creatures more generally applicable and at times describing things like statues depicting Bahamut as a minotaur, for example.

Yeah, they will need to do that, but this is basically a product of 5E kind of going retro (as compared to 4E) on how it treated various humanoids, so it's something they'll have to do "going forwards". Which means either with the 2024 release they'll need to re-work stuff a bit further, maybe even need to re-do Volo's down the line.

With that said...why bother with "not all Beholders are bad"? Their entire function in the game is to be boss monsters with an assortment of dangerous eye beams and their lore pretty much serves to reinforce them being lone boss monsters with minions who don't associate with other boss monsters so the DM won't throw two boss monsters at players at once. Is anyone really clamoring for Xurkgalok Doomsphere to become a respected member of society?

Non-bad Beholders go back to 2E if not 1E, dude.

Like, Beholders who are maybe technically Evil, as in that's their alignment, but who aren't "boss monsters" and nothing else.

I mean, literally there's a 5E book named after a "non-bad" Beholder for goodness sake. Y'all remember Xanathar? Like, dude is Lawful Evil, but stressing the Lawful, at least as in "organised, reasonable, non-psychopathic". It's a very small extension from Xanathar to a Beholder who is LN or maybe CG or the like. I suspect if I turned around and just utterly scoured my 2E stuff I could probably find a Neutral or Good aligned Beholder somewhere in there.

Clarifying it for the new people who might not be aware of deeper-lore stuff and/or those who think it's impossible despite said lore is helpful.

 

[HammerMan]

How does not mentioning a brothel foster anti-sexworker mindsets?

not mentioning them doesn't. If in 5.5/6/anniversary edition they never mentioned brothel I would most likely never notice and if I somehow did I wouldn't care... on the other hand going out of your way going on 10 years later to issue a retraction because the word offends, does.

The books probably don't mention mah jongg rooms either but that doesn't mean people are going to read it and say "hey, this book is against mah jongg!"

no, but if they went out of there way to say "Hey we want to remove the word Mah Jongg from this book from 10 years ago, they might.

If tomorrow they errata Tavern into Inn, would you not think "Hey, why are they against Tavern's?"

 

[HammerMan]

I post something in the thread this morning and when I get back I learn that D&D took away my hookers! I can't honestly say brothels have ever played a significant role in any of my D&D campaigns.

yeah that is another reason the change hit me as so strange (and yes anti SWer) because it wont effect any games. I can not imagine what taking it out does to any campaign.

 

[HammerMan]

Okay, lets shout this out once more for the people in the upper deck:

You Are Not Your Fandom

more people need to know this

I grew up loving a certain sitcom named for and fronted by a man who has been convicted for heinous crimes. I didn't throw my DVDs away. Sometimes I still watch them. Doesn't make me a supporter of what he did and I feel no need to go to freaking war to defend the show from people who don't want to deal with it any longer.

me too, I am going to bet it is the same monster...I mean man. However I still think he is funny, and I like shows he was in even if I don't like HIM. (there is another person later who was funny and I liked his show and his movies, and he ended up being as much of a tool as the things he used on the show... I also like this womans show and understand why she was fired, but don't like the show without her)

the problem comes from the fact that when people critizes those three people (and they do) they don't just stop at saying they are bad. they say that injoying them is supporting them, and that the work is tainted, and if you like the work YOU are tainted.

I read DC comics. That doesn't mean I love cutting people's left (always the left!!) arms off.

wait... Ineed to look this up...

As the world moves forward, we have to be able to examine and accept that some things we like might not be all that great. Maybe we just never noticed the issues, maybe it wasn't an issue people were vocal about in the past, maybe we even agreed with them then but have come to see things differently as we grow older and have more experiences with more people. I know I said and did and believed some very crappy things in days gone by I've come to regret now that I've met and seen people who it would have effected.

Yes and to come full circle, you need to approch it with "This was a work of that age, and now we have moved past" not "this was evil vile and racsist and we should have always known better" (not you in perticular you in general, as in all of us)

but we also have to look at what our new edits say... like when you take an off hand use of brothal out of the DMG 10ish years later.

 

[HammerMan]

Paizo has done exactly the same thing with Pathfinder 2e.

aren't they (erik mana especially) in trouble for doubling down on slaves after they finally removed the ability of PCs in there living setting from being able to buy and sell slaves as commodities?

 

[Azzy]

The stance some of the new players are taking is that the old game was morally deficient. By implication, that's kind of calling all the old players morally deficient to, via guilt-by-association, which given the moral failures being implied, would be pretty insulting to anyone. Naturally, that's triggering the old gamers to get angry that they're being called names, and responding in kind. It's been happening for a while, so now they're entering room already angry. But they didn't start this stuff--they were just fine with things as they were--it's pretty obvious that the small group of new gamers is using conflict to try and trigger a change.

Um, no. I'm pretty sure I'm an old gamer and I have no idea how you think WotC is implying that we older gamers are morally deficient. That's no a leap of logic, that's a giant skydive of nonsense. If you feel like you're being called out out, perhap you need to examine why that's the case.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

the problem comes from the fact that when people critizes those three people (and they do) they don't just stop at saying they are bad. they say that injoying them is supporting them, and that the work is tainted, and if you like the work YOU are tainted.

That's always a pretty disputed point, though, even on the Twitter Left or the like. Usually there are some young rapscallions who are keen to push the issue, but they're all like 22, and you know that by 35 they'll be hypocrites on this. But if they're saying "Don't keep buying stuff by bad people or promoting their work", that's pretty reasonable.

Yes and to come full circle, you need to approch it with "This was a work of that age, and now we have moved past" not "this was evil vile and racsist and we should have always known better" (not you in perticular you in general, as in all of us)

Except that sometimes that's exactly what it is.

This is part of what I was talking about re: "demonizing the past" often actually just being honest about the past. Sometimes we should always have known better. People at the time knew better. People did have unusual views which later generations claimed were normal in an attempt to defend that person or whatever.

Columbus is a good example. He's been a ridiculously lionized and positively misrepresented figure, rarely seen as anything but purely heroic from like 1800 to about 1970, but even at the time of his expedition, there were people writing that he was an absolute psychopath who not only allowed but encouraged his men to participate in what some on the expedition with him felt were hideous and unholy crimes (and literally everyone today would). Even now I very much doubt many US schools teach about the stuff he was involved with.

HP Lovecraft is another, obviously lesser example. His racism wasn't "normal for 1930", it was pretty wild even for 1930, especially as it extended to seeing even Scottish people as "subhuman". Yes there was a lot of really wacky racism going on back then but even by those standards he was taking it to another level (it's actually so insanely extreme that I think it comes across as slightly less offensive than the casual but less extreme racism of some of his contemporaries, because it's so hard to parse/lunatic).

And other figures, like Chivington who EGG was basically saying was "talking facts" are wild as hell. That guy was such a monster he caused widespread revulsion and anger throughout American society and probably actually accidentally helped avert more steady Native American genocide/ethnic cleansing because people were so shocked certain policies largely got put on hold (for a while). I mean this is a guy who you can't even Godwin, because he's like, to the right of Hitler.

If we're just talking D&D, there's absolutely stuff which was racist and dumb at the time. Maztica is a good example. POCGamer has a good, short-ish article on it here: Celebrating Subjugation: The Maztican Tragedy (Paragraph 6 is the payoff) There was nothing about that which was a good idea, and yeah, it's racist. Same for the setting, which I'm forgetting the name of, which went to some lengths to characterize various Evil humanoids as having the cultures of Native Americans and others, and then sent the PCs to kill them. That's just racist and dumb, and by the 1990s there was no excuse for not knowing that. Sheesh, I was a kid in the 1990s and I could tell Maztica was racist-as-hell.

Whereas there is some stuff you might get away with saying "Well, just a product of it's time". Oriental Adventures is sort of in the balance there. On the one hand, it's stuffed with stereotypes and cliches, and it presents the whole "Orient" as "Japan". On the other, it has a very holistic picture, doesn't paint it as better/worse than the West, and actually had people of the appropriate culture and ethnicity (Japanese people) involved in making it (albeit as advisors only, note), which was something almost no RPG supplement (D&D or otherwise) had for like a decade or two after it, despite there being countless such books.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Um, no. I'm pretty sure I'm an old gamer and I have no idea how you think WotC is implying that we older gamers are morally deficient. That's no a leap of logic, that's a giant skydive of nonsense. If you feel like you're being called out out, perhap you need to examine why that's the case.

This to me suggests a lack of empathy. If you dont understand someone else's opinions, that's fine. But don't suggest that maybe there's something wrong with them for feeling that way. That just plays into those same concerns.