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.

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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.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Now if only they’d remove the murder is the best path to power stuff, the home invasion for fun and profit stuff, the kill everything and steal everything stuff, and all the conquistadors & colonizers stuff.

They don't need to do that, because even the young people of today know that murder is rarely the method used for money or power acquisition... murder usually results from people hating other people for who they are.

This whole idea of "murder for profit" that D&D and GTA and any and all games that involve "looting" have, is for the most part completely fantastical and everyone knows that. If you want to make any sort of money... no one goes out to kill people to do it, they are so many other better and safer ways to do so and get away with it and become much more wealthy because of it.

And that's why even Millenials and Gen Z aren't that much concerned about D&D's game mechanic of "kill them and take their stuff"... because that's for the most part the fakest thing in the entire game.

 

[Weiley31]

I can't wait till we reach the point where you roll dice to settle combat via having your PCs play Rock Paper, Scissors against the BBEG Demi-Lich.

 

[Bagpuss]

How about 1,000,000,000% less slavers and ex-slave peoples?

I omit the Underdark entirely in everything I run and design because that's the only thing down there.

See how easy it is to omit the things you don't like without changing the game significantly for everybody else...

well unless you are WotC that is.

 

[darjr]

I'm just pointing out that there was a long period where D&D tried to "think of the children" when it came to using language in it's game products, and it did come after a period of huge popularity followed by harsh criticism.

History repeats

Anyway, I'll let you get back to discussing if brothels in D&D tanar-ri-izes sex workers.

Satanic panic was a minority of ninnies. It only took SIX letters to Sears for TSR to remove devils and demons.

These changes are ones the creators feel better about and, as far as I can tell, a huge contingent of their new customers.

On top of it the satanic panic was folks trying to STOP D&D, these changes are for folks who currently play and will continue too.

Conflating the two is disingenuous in my view.

 

[bedir than]

Can you tell me how you meant your post then, since I must have misunderstood it.

You said: "I cannot fathom looking at the Realms or Eberron and thinking that though a player character's race doesn't determine culture Amn, Chult, the Dalelands, Sharn, Waterdeep, etc are all now the same."

The "now" strongly implies this was the change, and you are saying that you can't imagine how races doesn't imply culture in all of those locations.

Please, what did you mean?

I quoted someone who asserted that now every race has exactly the same culture and that the Realms are a mono-culture.

The change to the races is to remove default alignment for player characters.
There are also 100s of different cultures in the Forgotten Realms.

So i responded reminding everyone that the Realms isn't a monoculture.

 

[Scribe]

Play the game. Have fun. Respect the people at your table. Respect each other. If your game has to have "problematic" elements to feel like gaming to you, perhaps you should ask yourself why.

This isn't the issue. It's the line of what is or isn't problematic, and what the downstream impacts are of where the line is drawn in terms of design. RE: ASI.

The why is also debatable, but gets threads locked.

 

[Weiley31]

The why is also debatable, but gets threads locked.

I thought it was Orcs/Drows or Halflings with 20 STR that does that?

 

[Azzy]

D&D has always had an implied setting in the core books, and part of why settings like Dark Sun, Planescape and Eberron work is because the play against those implied assumptions. If they aren't their to react against it doesn't work as well.

If the setting can't stand on its own merits, it wasn't a good setting to begin with.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

It’s so funny to hear criticism to brothels becoming “american puritanism” when you live in a country where sex tourism is a very real and very predatory thing, that happens mostly in brothels. (It isn’t funny at all)

Radically over stated, there are far more legitimate Brothels, and by that I mean slave and children free (mostly adult message parlors and stripclubs that allow or look the other way when talent offers "extras" as in most places Brothels aren't official legal in most places in North America which causes tons of harm and puts men and women in danger).

 

[Oofta]

Yeah... but so what? All it means is that in 20 years time once our current culture discussions play themselves out... perhaps all these words find themselves being put back in because things ended up not playing out what the folks of today thought they might. And if that happens, what's been lost?

I mean, did anyone find that 2E D&D was unplayable without having devils and demons in them? Based on what I've ever heard about how people reacted to that game... I'd say No. People played and enjoyed 2E without issue. And for those players for whom it DID matter... they just continued playing AD&D and never lost those creatures.

And that's always the point. The people who feel like they NEED all orcs to be vicious monsters (for example) are going to play with them that way regardless of whatever a new book writes. So there is absolutely no reason why the book can't change. The only reason why someone wants a book not to change is so that they don't have to feel like their beliefs are being left behind. But I mean come on... we're all adults here. We can and should get over that need for a cultural pat-on-the-back.

For orcs in my campaign it's not that I need orcs to be vicious monsters, it's that if they are not vicious monsters I have no need for them. There's not much to an orc, or the majority of races or monsters, if there's nothing that sets them apart. I understand people want unique cultures, but how does anyone do that when anything that slightly resembles a real world culture gets labeled as cultural appropriation? If we try to remove everything that could possibly be offensive, I think we're left with bland grayness. On the other hand, the devs are kind of walking a tightrope. Books with new races sell, but then we get things like Tabaxi who "come from a far away land" and are ... wait for it ... cat people. Ooh boy, exciting. But I'm sure for some people them being cat people or bird people or fish people will be more than enough. It's more that if every race is justified solely by being exotic and different then Syndrome was right. If everybody is special then no one is.

One of the reasons I only use the "standard" PHB player races, and one of the reasons why the vast majority of my villains come from those races, is because I can come up with something to distinguish them other than their costume. D&D seems to be going away from making different races unique, I just hope they can find a balance between truly offensive (there has always been some of that) and being so bland and generic that it's boring.

Of course this is all just my personal preference, there's nothing wrong with Mos Eisley Tavern campaigns and so on.