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.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It's also imprecise to call the history of DnD "Harmful". More accurate would be "contains harmful elements." It contains harmful elements now. In 20 years, things that people feel are fixed and good will be seen as regressive and harmful by the people coming up. People who see themselves as just and fair often end up resting on their laurels. I get it. It's tiring, the constant change. Just learn to take a pause when someone says "Hey, this thing you like, it hurts me."

I think the issue is: how are they "harmful"?

The common answer would be that the ideas in them are bad and it is harmful to propagate those ideas by keeping them in the game because players might read them and those ideas might get into their heads making them think bad things and possibly do bad things. This implies that the people who have already read those things have already become bad people since they've been infected with those ideas.

So it is really impossible to say these are "harmful elements" without simultaneously implying that the people who experienced those elements aren't somehow harmed by them. If they weren't harmed by them and they didn't harm anyone else because of them then the elements aren't harmful. If they aren't harmful then they don't need to be removed.

 

[Alby87]

I was just thinking: the roleplaying parts from volo and the alignement parts from PHB were culture related. Will WotC release those text, sanitized, in a FR setting book? Like: in PHB and Volo there are the mechanics of a Beholder as a specie of monster, in the multiverse can be anything, but in the forgotten realms, the beholder is (put the cut text from volo). Also for races: elves are mechanical this, can be anything you want and your DM allows. In the forgotten realms, there are those cultures, and the alignement of the culture (not the alignement of the single creature) is this.

Am I totally wrong? Remember, those errata were programmed to be published at the same time of the gift set. To be honest, I thought a lot more technical errata would be published for XGE and TCE

 

[Saracenus]

I found the mascot for those that object to the changes to alignment WotC is making to "evil" races... The homicidal/genocidal inclined Paladin from Journey Quest... Glorian! ONWARD!

Remember "Killing = Honor!"

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But this time around, I think most of the people who are critical of D&D are fans, not religious/cultural haters. The critics today are mainly people who want their game to be better for they way they play it, and for who they play it with.

I think the critics today are people arguing a strawman-like argument. The changes are being made due to hypothetical situations rather than anything that’s actually happened. The argument is "What if someone was thinking of getting into D&D and they saw the word barbarian. In theory, they might be turned off by that given it has historically been used to demean certain people. I've never met anyone who would be turned off by that but I could conceive of someone who was, so we should change it."

Every time I see these things brought up it is always in the context of "I'm not offended by this but I'm sure someone else might be. Let's change it to be safe."

 

[Geoff Thirlwell]

Putting aside the rights and wrongs about removing alignment, pick your own stat increases and the removal of text from Volo’s, what market research did WotC carry out which led them to make these change? I think I’ve completed all their surveys and can’t recall any questions relevant to these changes. What was the purpose of the surveys if they didn’t cover what they ended up changing?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think the problem with this statement is the farther you are from the current edition, the harder it is to find people to play with.
Just finding people you mesh with to play 5e can be hard; 3.5e or 2e are even more challenging. And if you find some niche indie RPG or OSR game then you better have an existing group to play with.
Dune and Vaesen might have been the most anticipated RPGs of 2021 at ENWorld, but they're still 0.02% of Roll20 accounts. I quite liked the Alien RPG when I read it and would like to test it out, but there's a single group on Roll20 looking for players.

I quite like 5e, but am feeling disenfranchised with recent releases, and know I'm unlikely to pick-up 6e. The target audience will be half my age. I accept that not every book will be for me. (Nor would I want every book to be for me.) But when no books are for me anymore—including ones that would have been right up my alley just four or five years prior—it's hard not to feel slighted.
I've probably bought the last D&D book I'll ever buy. (I literally just received a cheque for Christmas from family this afternoon, and normally that'd go right to D&D books and RPG supplies but I honestly have no idea what to gift myself anymore.)
When/if my current group falls apart, my time rolling physical dice is over. I will have aged out of the hobby.

Mod Note:

Quoting a mod note (orange or red text) and issuing commentary on it could be taken as “challenging moderation”- a violation. I’m NOT taking it that way.

If you hadn’t quoted that post and opened up with “I think the problem with this statement is…”, your comment would be within the ToS.

So please, just resist the urge to quote moderation posts.

 

[Bagpuss]

I was just thinking: the roleplaying parts from volo and the alignement parts from PHB were culture related. Will WotC release those text, sanitized, in a FR setting book?

But Volo is FR. If they wanted it to be a general book then don't have it nominally written by a FR character.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think the critics today are people arguing a strawman-like argument. The changes are being made due to hypothetical situations rather than anything that’s actually happened.

Then you’ve apparently missed literally dozens of threads on this site over the past few years in which several of your fellow ENWorlders have asserted otherwise,

Some, as they say, “with receipts.”

 

[Alby87]

But Volo is FR. If they wanted it to be a general book then don't have it nominally written by a FR character.

Absolutely right, but the way this edition works, book titles are not tied to settings: no Greyhawk in Mordenkainen or Tasha, no Dragonlance in Fitzban. Only a bland connection to FR in everyone.

 

[Staffan]

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!

That's one thing when it's a single individual like Gollum, and quite another when we're talking about a whole species like goblins. Particularly a humanoid species – an overtly magical species like dragons or some kind of fey being can get away with more.

There is no Prism Pentad. There never was. The only Dark Sun books ever published were the original boxed set.

I'm in a small minority in the Dark Sun fandom as I think the revised setting is actually better for a game than the original, though I agree that the way they went about changing it was... well, let's just say that there were plenty of areas with potential for improvement. But I like that there's more variety in how the city-states are run, and that the setting is in turmoil rather than the feel from the original box that "this is how it is, and this is how it always will be."