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.

 

[Alzrius]

But some people just aren't allowed through that gate.

That reminds me of a line from a recent strip in Penny Arcade:

 

[Minigiant]

I don't think D&D is the game for that approach. That works better in a game like Fate or Cortex, where you can make your race/species/lineage into one of your aspects/descriptors and then use that whenever it makes sense.

The more mechanics you give to races, the harder it is to add new races. And there will always be people out there who want to play rabbitfolk or slimegirls or whatever new weird thing just got an anime adaptation - the Cantina Approach (the universe is vast and filled with many races; you can play whatever you want because mechanically it doesn't really matter) is very broadly appealing and doesn't preclude thinking deeply about races and cultures and incorporating those thoughts into you game - it simply doesn't require it.

Having five really well-thought-out, highly detailed races with a lot of little details that impact play across pillars is good for a single setting but bad for a multi-setting game. And one thing that keeps people playing DnD is how easy it is to make the setting your own.

The issue I believe was never the Cantina approach and more that, because of the growing exposure and popularity of Fantasy and SciFi, many of the worlds and settings created by DMs or printed in the past aren't as interesting or exciting to the generic gamer anymore.

However due the DMs being the DMs, setting critique and criticism and suggestions for improvement or creativity only really comes from far lung outside observers.

So settings with highly detialed race of broad appeal and fun mechanics with well thought out antagonists come off as rare.

 

[cowpie]

And 5e has primarily depicted them as a sort of evil, demon-worshipping, cannibalistic, human-sacrificing "Mayincatec" culture, even with some "Feathered Serpent" themes included (and Keith Baker's Shulassakar Yuan-Ti are guilty of a lot of this, too), which, you know, is kinda iffy.

Sounds awesome! How do I sign up?

I also felt that as created, the Drow were based (per appendix N in the 1st Ed. DMG) on a couple of fantasy novels:

1) The Shadow People, by Margaret St Clair. She was a 60s Bay area psychedelic writer, who described an "Underearth" beneath San Francisco, where the "Green Elves" send their minions, the Orcs and Ettins, up to the surface to kidnap humans, and take them to the dark cavernous Fey "Vault" where the Elves dwell. There the victims become the enslaved playthings of their evil Fey masters.

2) The Elric Series, by Michael Moorcock. The Melniboneans are portrayed as the evil, decadent, demon worshiping elf-like beings, deliberately written to be the opposite of Tolkien's elves. The main character, Elric is a drug addicted albino sorcerer. When Gygax made the Drow "dark as midnight", this was likely to avoid a potential copyright lawsuit from Moorcock, as TSR had recently been sued by the Tolkien estate for directly referencing "Hobbits" and "Balrogs" in D&D Zero Edition. He made his Melnibonean "Shadow People" look like the opposite of Elric.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

I'm surprised they didn't replace the Kobold trait:

• Grovel, Cower, and Beg. As an action on your turn, you can cower pathetically to distract nearby foes. Until the end of your next turn, your allies gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies within 10 feet of you that can see you. Once you use this trait, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
  
  I always thought it was a poor trait for a whole species.

It could be fixed just by being more creative:

Distracting Antics. As an action on your turn, you can actively distract nearby foes. This could be singing, chanting, a war dance, groveling, making a mighty boast, or some other attention-getting activity. Until the end of your next turn, your allies gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies within 10 feet of you that can see you. Once you use this trait, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

It still plays into Kobolds as comedy relief, it's exactly the same mechanically, but allows the player a lot more freedom in deciding the personality of their character, and to come up with something on the spot that may leave everyone else in stitches if they have the inspiration.

 

[Vaalingrade]

That reminds me of a line from a recent strip in Penny Arcade:

Good job removing all that context!

 

[cowpie]

Well good. Cannot wait to move beyond this silly notion that entire races are inherently good or evil.

Yes, but can't mythical monsters be metaphors for humanity's capacity for good and evil? Like how western Dragons represent human Greed, or Goblins often represent human envy. They aren't supposed to be real people. They're archetypes for telling universal stories about the human condition. In other words, Gollum from LOTR is a character study on how evil and corruption can manifest in all human beings. He doesn't represent...I dunno...Mongolians or something. C'mon, that's silly!

Given that everything in the game is make-believe, and most sensible people can already tell the difference between a make-believe game and that stereotyping real people in real-life is wrong, is any of this actually making a difference, or really necessary?

Just because orcs are imaginary brutish, evil monsters in a game, doesn't mean that people possessing one iota of common sense are going to just assume that entire races of real people and evil in real life, because they read it in a lore entry in a D&D book. Isn't this assuming that people are passive sheep, easily influenced by some mystical "Dark Dungeons" level of mind control that D&D has over them?

 

[cowpie]

It could be fixed just by being more creative:

Distracting Antics. As an action on your turn, you can actively distract nearby foes. This could be singing, chanting, a war dance, groveling, making a mighty boast, or some other attention-getting activity. Until the end of your next turn, your allies gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies within 10 feet of you that can see you. Once you use this trait, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

It still plays into Kobolds as comedy relief, it's exactly the same mechanically, but allows the player a lot more freedom in deciding the personality of their character, and to come up with something on the spot that may leave everyone else in stitches if they have the inspiration.

I can see that, but given that pretty much all the humanoid monsters are archetypes of human foibles, every single one of them would need to be edited for content. It starts with orcs and drow, but somebody, somewhere can always find something problematic with every monster in the manual. Where does this logically stop. Kobolds, as written, are cartoon characters, which DMs whose character can already be house ruled by any DM, so why edit them at all?

 

[Alzrius]

Good job removing all that context!

What makes the sentiment insightful is that it works in any context.

 

[Ibrandul]

Question about the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan map. The TftYP errata says they've improved the readability of the map and provides a download link. I've compared this supposed new version to the one I've already got and it doesn't look any different at all. I wonder if they've uploaded the wrong map as the "fixed" one. Anyone else notice?

Yes, I asked the same question a few pages back. I think they must have mixed up the files.

It's not too surprising—earlier this year they released one of those Magic: The Gathering free PDF adventures downloadable from the WotC site where the map is missing a whole section of labeled areas discussed in the adventure. And, just as in that case, I expect them to simply ignore the error (that M:TG adventure's map is still wrong).

TSR and WotC have always had a lot of trouble with maps for some reason.

 

[Vaalingrade]

What makes the sentiment insightful is that it works in any context.

It honestly doesn't.

For those who didn't follow the link it's about Tycho insisting that not wanting NFTs in gaming is gatekeeping because he has his own NFTs he wants to sell. In context, he's misrepresenting gatekeeping for profit.