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.

 

[Staffan]

A Feathered Serpent Yuan-Ti sounds actually awesome. Especially since this is the first time I'm hearing of such a thing.

The idea came from one of Keith Baker's Dragonshards, which were short articles about Eberron that were published on the D&D site. They're no longer around there unfortunately, but that one is at least archived here (though it looks like crap since all the images are broken).

 

[HammerMan]

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

because these people (more women but some men) are one of the few people who can still be stigmatized.

Many years ago (after I started playing D&D but still long enough I don't want to count) I worked as a bouncer at both a regular bar and 2 strip clubs. You know what I learned... that people would try to stop women from working as strippers to 'protect them' but would also blame them if attacked (even if it wasn't in or even related to the job) because being a stripper brought it on. I am still friends with an owner (although I am too old and out of shape to do that work now) and watched during Covid as the same thing happened to women on Onlyfans. it is pretty evil really how we sweep the entire industry under a rug and then beat it... Men who were regulars in the club would outside the club talk about how the club should be closed 'to protect the children' when no children worked there. no children got in (unless they were REALLY good liers and frauds).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

THANKS! GREAT! I'd forgotten about the hillbilly ogres and so on, and now I have to remember! Urgh!

It was particularly appalling because someone I knew was like "Oh yeah Pathfinder is all, like, cool and mature and daring and creative, unlike dumb D&D!", and so on I read some of the Pathfinder stuff, including aforementioned Ogres and... yeah. No.

 

[HammerMan]

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.

now try to put together the ven diagram of those people who are or would be offended and people who rolled it on the chart or even noticed the chart...

I promise you it is small overlap, but erasing it (and calling it out as erasing it) is hurting the normalization of a job.

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.

okay, but that is out the window...it has been in the book for the better part of a decade.

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.

You know I started off by saying this was weird and prudish... but the more people defend it the more I feel it is out right wrong.

 

[Faolyn]

Not really. Because the target audience of 5th Ed was “D&D players.” It embraced and encouraged everyone to play. I remember a good mix of ages playing organized play. It was generational.

Now WotC is telling us “Hey, thanks for saving the game and keeping it alive. We appreciate your service. Goodbye.” They only care about the 20yo. To them, we’re just Thaco the grumpy clown.

I'm in my 40s, have been playing since 2e, had my favorite setting (Ravenloft) basically rewritten, and have never felt this way.

What I have always felt is that there was no need for me to buy the same thing over and over again. I was planning on not getting any Ravenloft books when 5e came out because I already had my 2e and 3x stuff. I didn't need the same thing just with different statblocks. So I was actually happy that Ravenloft was changed so dramatically. Now I have new things to play with. Do I like every change they made? No, but then again, I didn't like everything in the older books--and some things in the older books I actively hated (such as the sexism that comes with basing a setting off of books written in the 19th century and movies made in the mid-20th). With VGR, I now have a wider selection of things to pick and choose from, which is how I have always played D&D: taking the bits I like and using them how I like.

And enjoying something you’re too old for is fine if it’s you. Or you and some friends. But when you’re that old guy at a game store surrounded by people half your age it comes across a super creepy. And it’s even weirder in a homegame. Can you imagine being a 40yo and going to a game hosted in their parent’s basement? When you’re as old as their parents upstairs?
shudder

Huh--we would game at a friend's parents' house, and they always let us use their dining room table.

 

[DorkForge]

(1)right it has to do with the stigma a not insignificant part of the population puts up with... not just in brothels', but on only fans, in strip clubs, in the porn industry.

(2)cool, but that argument is 7-10 years too late...it is there.

(3)where I agree the art is a step forward I fear this is a step back.

yup

(4)and yet in a game about dragons and heroes and magic, the creators want to call out a single word on a table printed in a book years ago when in the next year or two it wont matter... because the new edition is coming.

(5)great... and 1 word on 1 chart stops this how? I have been playing with women (well young girls back then) since day 1. SOme of them have very vocally objected to the art... this table not once have I heard a peep.

(6)sex work is work. sex workers are no more or less people then any other profession. There is no need to 'opt in' to the brothal... you can do what I have done fore 30 years, fade to black.

I'm new here and don't know how to split up posts like you did, so I've numbered your points to reply to them:

1) You clearly think that those things being normal and there being no stigma is the right thing. I don't want those things to be a normal part of society. And I don't want to have to deal with rampant sexualisation because of it, and it's not just those places, because those places exist, they're depicted in shows and movies, where actresses are dressed (or not) appropriately for that place.

The pervasive sexualisation that has been occurring for a long time now has no constructive place in society in my opinion, if it is to exist it should be something that those interested in it seek out, not something that bleeds through into all facets of life. I couldn't read more than half of the 'newspapers' in the UK growing up without being shown women being made sex objects. Whether or not they choose to do that with their time and body is not the point, the point is that it effects others.

2) Except I seem to be right on time, as they just removed it. This is an edition where things are dynamically changed by errata, they put it there originally and now they have removed it.

3) How is removing an instance of sexualization a step backwards? How in anyway does that make sense?

4) The 2024 event is meant to be backwards compatible, and in the interim thousands of copies of the DMG will likely be sold. The attitude 'it's basically too late to make things better' is not good enough and will never lead to anything but harm. It's never too late to change for the better, it may not have been ideal timing, but it's never too late to be better.

5) So what? Some might not feel comfortable, some might not care, some might prefer it. That has zero bearing on not doing it to begin with, it's exposure to things like games you play as a child that normalises these things.

And what female players say at a table is a narrow metric, I don't allow it at tables I run that are all guys and I ask my DMs to avoid it. I don't want it, and I don't want to stand by and allow it where I have the power to make a difference. That is my stance as the man I have become after years of being a toxic part of the problem.

As for how one word makes that difference, every little helps, but if you nitpick every change then they'll never add up, will they? And in a roleplaying game someone rolling that option could lead to a very unpleasant experience.

6) What is it with you and this whole sex worker thing? No one has made them less as human beings, the exact opposite has happened in this thread. What you're doing is trying to normalise it as a profession which is entirely different and not something I support.

And you seem to be missing the point. If you're fading to black, it's still there, with plenty of potential for other things.

There's no good reason why something like a brothel should be included in the game, and if the game was created now instead of when it was, I have a feeling things like this wouldn't have been so ingrained to begin with.

Children play this game, they shouldn't come across these things and sorry, in today's age they'd just google what it is and that isn't leading anywhere wholesome or productive to healthy development.

 

[Umbran]

No man, you're not too old. Older people like ourselves have lived life a bit, and often have a better big picture perspective than angry young people on a moralistic crusade (not that they'll stop and listen to us).

Mod Note:

You know, the stereotyping of the people who disagree with you is not helping your case.

You've been taking jabs at people who don't agree with you quite a bit - enough that you've earned a ticket out of the thread.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The main problem is racism, not slavery and the entire idea that there are races of humans was more a invention of the 19th century and the rush to colonize Africa at which point large scale slavery was already over. So I see it as as a different issue.
And what is affecting people today is mostly poverty and their economic situation and not slavery.

Racism, as we know it, was invented, pretty much ex nihilo, in order to enable slavery, and it was invented a lot earlier than the 1800s (the 1600s were particularly key, when the idea of the "white race" started to be created). The 1800s just pushed it even further. Racism (in the modern sense) and slavery then became a sort of dynamo, with one driving the other. The idea that you can cleanly separate them is simply wrong. Seeing modern racism as simply appearing in the "rush for Africa" is like thinking that jet aeroplanes just popped into existence in the 1940s. Sure they made it much worse with more of a scientific veneer, but it was already well on the way, and the pseudoscience was just the latest adaptation of a long series of adaptations to make the concept more successful.

Likewise poverty in the US in many cases directly stems from the fallout of slavery meaning millions and millions of people in the 1860s started with basically zero in an area directly hostile to them getting anything (this is very different to the situation most immigrants faced - many of them came in with significant wealth, even ones who saw themselves as poor, and were entering a society far less hostile to them in most cases). This is a complex discussion which shouldn't be had here, though.

 

[CleverNickName]

Some folks in this thread have expressed their love for Dark Sun, and for Forgotten Realms, and for Ravenloft, and for my two coppers, I love the Mystara campaign setting. Warts and all.

It's the first campaign setting that I ever played, and I love the parallels that it draws between real-world cultures and mythologies. Want to adventure with the Vikings of old? Start out in the Kingdom of Ostland. Does the history of Ancient Egypt really inspire you? The Kingdom of Nithia has everything you need.

I say "warts and all" because those things I love about it are deeply problematic, and they always have been. By basing large amounts of the fantasy setting on real-world peoples, beliefs, and mythologies, you inadvertently will end up appropriating and misrepresenting those real-world peoples. Entire groups of marginalized people were reduced to hollow caricatures (at best) or racist stereotypes (at worst), and never get any real depth except to be comic relief, disaster-bait, or McGuffins for the real heroes of the game--"real heroes" that are almost always inspired by European standards.

If you say that you don't understand how that is a problem, and why that would make a large number of people upset, and why this would cause a large number of people to demand fair representation? Frankly I don't believe you. I think you understand fully, and are choosing to push back.

This isn't some new attitude that just sprung up out of the ground in year 2016; these issues have always been a problem since the time they were written: people have complained about them since the mid-1980s (and I should know, I was one of them). However, getting those complaints heard was a challenge. Before the Internet came along, complaints of this nature were made through telephone calls, letters to editors, and other hard-to-quantify and easy-to-ignore forms of communication. But now in the age of Social Media, these complaints are easy to quantify, impossible to ignore. This is a good thing.

So in my games, I try to be sensitive to these topics. Though I base my adventures in the Mystara world at large (and in the Town of Threshold specifically), I try my best to avoid offensive stereotypes, tropes, and writing practices. One of my players is First Nation, so I have to revise some parts of The Ethengar Khanate, and avoid other parts entirely. Another player has severe arachnophobia, so I removed the Aranea from The Isle of Dread, for example. These are good things. I don't think anyone with friends would want to do otherwise.

To demand that Wizards of the Coast (or any publisher) ignore requests for fair representation, cultural sensitivity, diversity, etc. is not only unreasonable, it's economic suicide. Are you really suggesting that a publisher could go back to ignoring the complaints of marginalized, exploited, and misrepresented people all over the world, and still be successful? To put it in an even more obvious way: if a publisher does all of the things that TSR did back in the 1980s, in the same way that TSR did them in the 1980s, they will get the same results that TSR got in the 1980s.

Sure, I'm sad that Mystara is out of print, and will likely never be published again. But only a little. I mean, there are plenty of us who love that campaign setting, and we are still out there, creating new content for it and trading ideas, converting the old rules and adventures to different rules sets, and gushing about the things we find at flea markets. The setting might be out of print, but that's not a problem in the age of online forums, print-on-demand services, and virtual tabletops. The original materials are out there, and so are its fans and players. I'm as unhappy as I choose to be, I suppose.

 

[Faolyn]

does anyone do anything at all for Columbus day?

Buy mattresses?