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.

 

[HammerMan]

The problem is really less about the potential outrage of people who just don't want brothels, but more the people who have negative views of sex workers who would use it. And I don't mean negative in that they don't like sex workers, but the more lurid and outdated ideas about what sex work is.

yeah, I thought it funny and weird... now I am seeing such vitriol about a progressive idea like sex work is work and am feeling majorly bumbed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't feel like the conversation that I literal started by saying "thats weird" and has pinwheeled into a major thing needs to be private.

I do. Because there's absolutely zero possibility of either of you giving an inch, learning a damn thing, or even furthering the discussion of the particular topic. Also both of you are gradually drifting into namecalling, which I guess is a job for the mods but maybe don't make them mod you guys? Again neither of you is actually "wrong", but because neither of you is willing to give even an inch from absolutist positions, it's not an interesting or educational discussion.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For those who want sex to be in D&D Baldur's Gate 3 has optional sex scenes with companion characters and a certain NPC. Plus lots of swear words and evil goblins and tiefling refugees run out of the city of Elturel due to racism against them (which you can help an evil druid kill if you choose not to save them).

Honestly with the changes being made to D&D now I'm curious if that's causing problems for the BG3 team and whatever plans they had.

 

[HammerMan]

Again neither of you is actually "wrong", but because neither of you is willing to give even an inch from absolutist positions, it's not an interesting or educational discussion.

your right I am not willing to give an inch. I'm not one for name calling, and maybe I was more snide then I wanted to come off. I will say that prejudice against sexworkers is harmful.

 

[Scribe]

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.

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.

We will never agree then. Becuse it isn't just normal it is BOTH normal and demonized.

So heres the thing. We have polar opposite views, both valid.

now I am seeing such vitriol about a progressive idea like sex work is work and am feeling majorly bumbed.

And we have a demonstration that what is seen (by some) as progressive (and we are hammered on that progressive = good by social media) is not actually agreed upon at all.

Do I have issue with 'brothel'. Nope. I have far greater issue with a person's personal crusade to get furry 'adult media' as being accepted in Wizards books. Brothels, and slavery, are a pretty standard part of a pseudo-fantastical world, which is what D&D would appear to be.

Heck, I have even less issue with strip clubs (we called it the ballet on the football team...but anyway) but this whole line of discussion by HammerMan, who's views I appreciate in other threads on other topics, demonstrates that even things which are seen as progressive (=good) by some, are being removed by Wizards, for 'reasons'.

Its just madness (also removed lul) and I dont see how its a net positive to scrub the game to try to appeal to some tepid watered down baseline.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

How many generations and centuries does something needs to be in the past before in can be referenced safely? I doubt that many potential players even know if and how their ancestors were enslaved and just assume they were.

I certainly have no idea what all my ancestors were doing 200-300 years ago.

Consider that a farm in Georgia run on slavery was just busted a week or so ago means it’s not exactly the past. See also the amount of other forms of human trafficking going on in the world today.

 

[Scribe]

For those who want sex to be in D&D Baldur's Gate 3 has optional sex scenes with companion characters and a certain NPC.

And its written considerably poorly to boot.

 

[Ixal]

Consider that a farm in Georgia run on slavery was just busted a week or so ago means it’s not exactly the past. See also the amount of other forms of human trafficking going on in the world today.

That hardly applies to a "significant portion of potential players" as it was claimed in the post I responded to.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And its written considerably poorly to boot.

Wait ... are you trying to say that a sex scene in a videogame was ... poorly written?

 

[Justice and Rule]

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.

You know that this guy is the boss of Paizo?

So I wanted to follow up on this because in looking it up, you're kind of taking his quote in the wrong context. That is, the context of the letter that was written in.

Here's his statement on the Paizo boards, which I think clears things up quite a bit:

I think that's taking the posts to an extreme that neither of them really go to. I doubt Erik Mona is saying "we're going to rewrite and reprint Ironfang Invasion". More, "In the future, we're going to decenter slavery as a story device, and we're going to deemphasize it when explaining the lore of the world."

It's this.

The mistake I made with the Absalom book is in dwelling too much on a very sensitive topic. Yes, the PFS plotline helped by removing legal slavery from the city, but I should have just let well enough alone, mentioning that it had happened in the timeline and then moving on to any of a countless number of other evils.

Instead I wanted to flesh out the context more, and make the change a more holistic part of the setting while still giving a few illegal baddies for people to kill.

The thing is, with this topic, that's too much. People just hate it in the setting period. We really should not have put it in there in the first place. Trying to deal with "phasing it out" within the context of the story adds fuel to the fire and makes people even more uncomfortable.

It's not worth it.

So while I suspect the word may come up a time or two in the future, we're just not going to be covering it going forward. A few in-production items might reference it still, but it's no longer going to be a notable part of the Golarion campaign setting.

If you want to write a big adventure where people burn Okeno to the ground to have it all make sense within the fiction of the campaign world, you are free to do so.

But we are not going to.

Essentially they are trying to deemphasis slavery as a touchstone of Golarion in the future, which makes sense given the letter: a big part of the struggle for players here was the ridiculous idea that they'd have to go through "in story" to remove the ability for PFS players to buy slaves. In this case, it's not that slavery is disappearing via magical wand, but just that they not going to mention it as a feature of their setting. Creating adventures to explain it would only further the mistaken idea that you have to do something "in-story" to end it.