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.

 

[Scribe]

I'm talking about Pathfinder.

Ah well that was just an amusing aside.

I'm glad to be corrected in that case.

 

[HammerMan]

Have you considered that it's not because the word "offends" anyone but because they don't want to imply the possibility of sex trafficking or sexual assault?

OMG stop conflating sex work with abuse... abuse is wrong sex work is work

Both of which are things that happen to people, and some of those people are going to be gamers.

yeah it also happens in bars and in allies should we remove those? what about stores? schools? please tell me the place safe from abuse...

You can talk about legal brothels and not looking down on sex workers all you want--and I support both of those ideas--but right now, the reality is generally quite a bit different.

and as long as we aren't talking but instead eraseing (literally the errata is to erase it) it will get worse not better.

Which actually brings up another point: most gaming groups don't have PCs who want to be sex workers (have sex, sure; sell sex, not so much). I'd wager a fair number of gaming groups have at least one PC who would like to put on a show. I would imagine that a music hall actually provides more RP options for players than a brothel would, including PCs who don't imagine their character having sex with a prostitute.

then don't include it next time... or skip over it this time (10ish years ago) don't erase sex workers and call it out in some big errata push.

 

[HammerMan]

Then didn't even remove it! They abolished it in Absalom, the hub city of the world. Slavery still exists in Katapesh and Cheliax.

I can't beleive more people are for removing the bad/wrong word for a safe place for sexworkers then would want the main setting not to have slaves...

 

[HammerMan]

Actual definition: a drainage basin.

UK definition: 9 p.m., when they start showing TV that isn't for kids.

itresting, we have something like that but it starts at 10 and doesn't have a cool name

 

[Ixal]

Then didn't even remove it! They abolished it in Absalom, the hub city of the world. Slavery still exists in Katapesh and Cheliax.

Last word from Erik:
Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

We’re just going to move on from it, period.

 

[Scribe]

I can't beleive more people are for removing the bad/wrong word for a safe place for sexworkers then would want the main setting not to have slaves...

I'm not understand your push for sex work being work either, but here we are LOL.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Then didn't even remove it! They abolished it in Absalom, the hub city of the world. Slavery still exists in Katapesh and Cheliax.

That's what I get for giving the company that brought you hillbilly ogres and the child abuse demon a shred of credit.

Edit: or they really are growing out of their edgy teenager phase. I'm so confused right now.

 

[Justice and Rule]

And what is affecting people today is mostly poverty and their economic situation and not slavery.

History is a continuum, not a series of unconnected points. Things like poverty in minority communities are often related to the long-term harm done to them by racially-discriminatory laws that popped up after the Civil War to keep them "in line". While things like segregation have fallen by the wayside, things like redlining are still around. These are all echoes of slavery and the systems created by it.

OMG stop conflating sex work with abuse... abuse is wrong sex work is work

yeah it also happens in bars and in allies should we remove those? what about stores? schools? please tell me the place safe from abuse...

and as long as we aren't talking but instead eraseing (literally the errata is to erase it) it will get worse not better.

then don't include it next time... or skip over it this time (10ish years ago) don't erase sex workers and call it out in some big errata push.

She isn't conflating it with abuse, she's pointing out that others might because they do not have your more progressive attitude towards sex work. It's worth noting that there are plenty of people who have bad ideas about sex work, if confronted with it without properly going into what sex work can mean in their world. There are plenty of people out there who would see the word "brothel" and take all the wrong ideas from it, whether they get offended or instead create some lurid scene that WOTC didn't intend.

I think what most people are saying in regards to this is that it is not an issue that you can just "toss in" but must be setup and addressed. They have to define what "sex work" is in their world so that everyone understands what they mean by it, otherwise you'll have people look and take the negative versions of it rather than the potential positives. Given how badly sex work is portrayed in fiction (even today) I think it's a legitimate concern.

Last word from Erik:
Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

We’re just going to move on from it, period.

Yeah, I'm not going to take a comment on a blog as gospel. Let's wait on Paizo to say it themselves.

EDIT: It's worth noting that the phrasing of how they are going to remove slavery is in reference to players pushing to remove the ability of other players to own slaves in Pathfinder Society, their Adventurer's League. Essentially it was put off because they said they'd have to have a world event to have Absalom ban slavery again, so they ended up doing that at the start of 2E (or maybe at the end of 1E, I'm not quite sure).

That's what I get for giving the company that brought you hillbilly ogres and the child abuse demon a shred of credit.

Edit: or they really are growing out of their edgy teenager phase. I'm so confused right now.

Their Mwangi book was really, really good, and I think their world-building has largely improved.

 

[Ixal]

Yeah, I'm not going to take a comment on a blog as gospel. Let's wait on Paizo to say it themselves.

You know that this guy is the boss of Paizo?

 

[Justice and Rule]

You know that this guy is the boss of Paizo?

He's not the boss, he's a boss. And I'll wait for an official response first, because a comment on a blog is not that.