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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

demonizing the past

As someone with a strong interest in ancient history, I'd say that 99% of what people claim is "demonizing the past" is actually "being honest about the past", rather than glorifying stuff which was totally grim. The Roman Empire is a great example. Any realistic appraisal of it has it having many amazingly horrific elements (which sometimes even people at the time notice, and other cultures often notice), but from the renaissance until like, the 1960s, it was routinely glorified, and we're still dealing with fallout from that.

 

[CleverNickName]

As someone with a strong interest in ancient history, I'd say that 99% of what people claim is "demonizing the past" is actually "being honest about the past", rather than glorifying stuff which was totally grim. The Roman Empire is a great example. Any realistic appraisal of it has it having many amazingly horrific elements (which sometimes even people at the time notice, and other cultures often notice), but from the renaissance until like, the 1960s, it was routinely glorified, and we're still dealing with fallout from that.

This is an interesting point. I'm not a historian, but that sounds about right.

 

[LongTimeLurker]

This is exactly why i have already abandoned WoTC d&d. I hope these changes bring about whatever effect that they're hoping for. I'll be a semi interested observer but I don't think I'll ever give Wizards money for D&D stuff again.

 

[HammerMan]

I think the key thing to make this sort of stuff work is to not use comparative shorthand like that. Let people draw the comparisons for themselves. Don't say "Like the Samurai and US Marshalls", for examples, just describe them, and then let readers figure out the similarities or not.

The difficulty is always lazy or poorly-directed artists who then do something like straight-up draw a Hobgoblin in Samurai-style armour with a katana.

I mean (and I say this alot) no one is paying me to write these books. This is how I would describe them at the table, if I needed a quick short hand...

 

[Bolares]

yeah, as much as I am 100% for improving the game (both in inclusiveness and game play) I find demonizing the past to be a great way to cause schisms... Can't we improve without calling the work that came before it names... remember those 'dark, tragic past's are theonly reason enworld is here, or we have an RPG community or D&D at all.

Man.. you like using the word demonizing huh...

 

[Faolyn]

From a modern perspective, then, there are reasonable issues and concerns from both points of view. I do think that a game like D&D becomes ... well, it's even more fraught because it is so relentlessly combat-centric, and because it features concepts like the Thief and the Assassin and the Necromancer up-front. In short, I find it odd that it tends to reinforce a cultural belief that issue of violence and poison and even murder-for-hire are perfectly acceptable within the game, but the mere mention of the possibility of sexual activity is being stamped out- I think that this is typical, but also strangely weird.

Here's my take on that: In D&D, most violence (at least that committed by the players) is two-sided: the players are usually fighting other people who are also prepared for combat. While I'm sure there are games wherein PC assassins (by class or by trade) are literally hiding in the shadows and assassinating people who are just going about their regular business and aren't expecting to be killed, and then slipping away into the night, I think that's a pretty small minority of games. Most of the time, the PCs are in life-or-death situations or at least fighting against a greater evil--such as slavers. And if you do have PCs who are going around murdering people who aren't in combat, prepared for combat, or who are completely non-combat--well, if this were an earlier edition, that PC would probably end up losing their Good alignment, if they had one to begin with.

Compare to something involving sex. If there's violence, it's usually one-sided, against a naked or nearly-so person who is usually a lot weaker and not at all prepared for combat. With a brothel, there's so much baggage that comes with real-world sexual exploitation that it can be hard to not see the violence in the background.

Of course, in a fantasy brothel where everyone is a totally consenting adult who gets a fair wage for their labor there isn't going to be that sort of violence in the background--but writing up a treatise on the happy history of prostitution in the Setting Of Choice is, as I said, something for a blog article and probably not something that there will be room for in a typical setting book.

Plus, well, sex is generally a more private thing to begin with and it's kind of weird to be narrating your imaginary sex life to people who are not involved with it and who very likely didn't sign up for the game to hear about it. They signed up for a game where they would be killing monsters and taking their stuff.

 

[HammerMan]

As someone with a strong interest in ancient history, I'd say that 99% of what people claim is "demonizing the past" is actually "being honest about the past", rather than glorifying stuff which was totally grim.

I would love to read a lot about the real past (when I get time) but in this case by 'demonizing the past' I meant like literally in my life time past (or just before it when D&D was created about the time I was born). I mean calling the last 4ish editions dark or harmful or implying that the players/writers/readers had any harm in mind.

The Roman Empire is a great example. Any realistic appraisal of it has it having many amazingly horrific elements (which sometimes even people at the time notice, and other cultures often notice), but from the renaissance until like, the 1960s, it was routinely glorified, and we're still dealing with fallout from that.

agreed... there is a reason I can use them for my mostly villian hobgoblin empire

 

[CleverNickName]

This is exactly why i have already abandoned WoTC d&d. I hope these changes bring about whatever effect that they're hoping for. I'll be a semi interested observer but I don't think I'll ever give Wizards money for D&D stuff again.

We're the polar opposite here. Half my gaming group is getting new D&D books for Christmas (hardcopies, to celebrate our return to in-person gaming), and I've asked Santa for a copy of Fizban's Treasury of Dragons.

I've been a very good moogle.

 

[Mordhau]

I don't expect to see Druid go anywhere any time soon. No-one uses it abusively. There's no major world religion which uses the term, and the neo-pagan groups which do have zero clout (of any kind, including on Twitter). It's been very well-established by TT RPGs and more importantly video games to represent a very specific kind of magic-user (and not uncommon in TV/movies either).

Barbarian on the other hand, well, I think 5.5/6E is probably the last edition where it's actually called that. It's much rarer as a term in video games, and is frequently used as a term of abuse (usually as "barbaric"), primarily against majority non-white cultures (or, really unfortunately, to imply Western cultures are "just as bad" as those - uhoh, frankly). Not sure what the alternative term is, but honestly you could probably fold it in to Fighter and/or Ranger, like in 2E (where the "Barbarian" class was oh god no awful, introduced in a Complete Handbook, and basically a bad Fighter designed to cover the warriors of various "primitive" (kill me now) societies. It was one of those classic early '90s utterly ham-fisted attempts to "get modern" which end up more racist than if they just didn't, like WoD:Gypsies).

Berserker seems to be the obvious alternative.

It also seems to be more descriptive of the class (and will stop the bizarre recurrent attempts I see to make a steppe horse archer subclass for Barbarains).

 

[Scribe]

They signed up for a game where they would be killing monsters and taking their stuff

Amen. Now point me to the door to kick in.