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.

 

[Justice and Rule]

wait... Ineed to look this up...

As a DC Comics fan, I feel I might have to explain this for some people: one of the creators (Geoff Johns, who has been implicated in some problematic stuff around the Justice League movie) had a habit of having characters lose their hands in his comics, to the point that it basically became a meme.

Of course, the question is still, "does a creator's personal politics make their creations not worth appreciating, or say something negative about you if you do appreciate them"? From what I've seen, a lot of people on the internet seem to think the answer is yes.

I think it's more nuanced than that. I like some of HP Lovecraft's work, but I totally understand the problematic nature of a lot of it. I don't feel like people make assumptions about me in that regard. Now if I go around saying "I don't see why people think he's all that problematic", then you'll get people making assumptions about you. As @Vaalingrade has said (or basically has said, I'm not going to go that far back to check the exact wording) it's okay to like problematic stuff as long as you recognize it as being problematic. The thing with TTRPGs is that they are living games, which unlike a lot of fiction means that you either continue the problematic trends or start to fix them.

I don't think I've ever seen an edgy tiefling played. The pizza cutters (all edge, no point) I'm aware of tend toward humans, shadar-kai and weirdly halflings and pixies (because the point is to corrupt something traditionally pure).

Tieflings I've seen tend to be cheerful, energetic or super-righteous.

Edit: Come to think of it, most tieflings I've seen are descendants of either Jester of the one from the 'I'm a gnome' ad.

I feel like most tieflings I've seen are loveable rogues. They play like a race of Han Solos.

. Yet that is totally fine but people are concerned about the word Madness, Brothel or Slavery (Paizo just promised to never ever mention slavery again after a anonymous freelancer complained that it was too prominent in Golarion) because apparently even just using those words causes some sort of harm.
Which for me is just silly, but I guess I am too old and thus not sensitive enough for that.

I mean, when did this happen? I don't remember hearing about it and the Lost Omens book have plenty of mentions of it. Are you talking about the gratuitous usage of slavery, like Absalom's situation of "No one here likes slavery but we are going to be a slave-trading hub because our leader decided to allow it"? I feel like I've had this argument with you beforehand.

 

[Faolyn]

not mentioning them doesn't. If in 5.5/6/anniversary edition they never mentioned brothel I would most likely never notice and if I somehow did I wouldn't care... on the other hand going out of your way going on 10 years later to issue a retraction because the word offends, does.

Have you considered that it's not because the word "offends" anyone but because they don't want to imply the possibility of sex trafficking or sexual assault? Both of which are things that happen to people, and some of those people are going to be gamers. You can talk about legal brothels and not looking down on sex workers all you want--and I support both of those ideas--but right now, the reality is generally quite a bit different.

If tomorrow they errata Tavern into Inn, would you not think "Hey, why are they against Tavern's?"

I literally would not notice. Or possibly, I would assume they were turning it into an inn so the PCs can rent a room there. I wouldn't assume they were "against" taverns.

Which actually brings up another point: most gaming groups don't have PCs who want to be sex workers (have sex, sure; sell sex, not so much). I'd wager a fair number of gaming groups have at least one PC who would like to put on a show. I would imagine that a music hall actually provides more RP options for players than a brothel would, including PCs who don't imagine their character having sex with a prostitute.

 

[Ixal]

I mean, if they're American, and Black (or part-Black), and their ancestors didn't arrive in the last 150 years, yeah, they pretty much know for sure their ancestors were slaves. Same for people from a number of colonial New World locations, actually.

It's pretty wild that this didn't occur to you.

Some of their ancestors certainly were slaves, unless of course they came to the US after the end of slavery and just don't know that anymore.
And even if, people hardly know how many ancestors were slaves or when they were freed. So how would that affect people today?
Heck, I have ancestry in the Balkans so there is a chance that one or more of my ancestors were enslaved by the Osmans 300 years ago. So what?

 

[Weiley31]

Did Eilistraee even get listed in the DMG?

Even if she didn't, she still existed regardless LOOOOOOOOONG before 5E came about.

 

[Ixal]

I mean, when did this happen? I don't remember hearing about it and the Lost Omens book have plenty of mentions of it. Are you talking about the gratuitous usage of slavery, like Absalom's situation of "No one here likes slavery but we are going to be a slave-trading hub because our leader decided to allow it"? I feel like I've had this argument with you beforehand.

Quite recently

From a Freelancer: An Open Letter to Erik Mona

Editorial Note from Owen: As someone established in the industry, one of the things I have done before and expect I will do again is to post messages written by other people who, for whatever reaso…

owenkcstephens.com

 

[Scribe]

Well that's for wotc to decide. But the question remains (and I think I've asked you this in other similar threads), why not just play your preferred edition, with all the adventures and supplements you want available on dtrpg? Or play another osr game and make use of all the creative products being produced right now? fwiw, this is what I do when I want to run a dnd-like game, not necessarily because I have a specific problem with 5e I just find these other games easier to run and more fun.

Of course of course, as you and Ruin Explorer point out, and as we see in every living fandom.

"They own it and can retcon whatever they like so there!"

We get it.

Are we at that point in the thread where we are told to pound sand?

And yes, I'll play PF1, 2e, 3.5, or my own setting with the extremely limited 5e rules, or Levelup, after changing the things I don't like in that.

That doesn't mean what Wizards, and Paizo, shouldn't be commented on.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Some of their ancestors certainly were slaves, unless of course they came to the US after the end of slavery and just don't know that anymore.
And even if, people hardly know how many ancestors were slaves or when they were freed. So how would that affect people today?
Heck, I have ancestry in the Balkans so there is a chance that one or more of my ancestors were enslaved by the Osmans 300 years ago. So what?

Do you live in the Balkans? Because if not, you're missing the point.

Black Americans live in America. Up until 150 or so years ago, the US had slavery in a huge number of states. Even after slavery got shut down, massive scars of slavery remained in American society, and until the 1960s, the descendants of slaves had fewer rights and were pretty brutally oppressed in a lot of places, because of the slavery. The 1960s is not very long ago. To this day, there's a ton of fallout continuing from the slavery.

If you lived in the Balkans, you might be able to argue some similarity, because the Balkans ARE still suffering from the impacts of stuff that happened 300 years ago. I lived through the '90s, I remember the wars.

But I'm guessing you don't, right? And that's 300 years, 10 generations, as opposed to 5.

I think by, say 2150, yeah things might look a bit different re: attitudes to slavery and so on. But that's 130-odd years away, so maybe don't get ahead of ourselves?

 

[Justice and Rule]

Have you considered that it's not because the word "offends" anyone but because they don't want to imply the possibility of sex trafficking or sexual assault? Both of which are things that happen to people, and some of those people are going to be gamers. You can talk about legal brothels and not looking down on sex workers all you want--and I support both of those ideas--but right now, the reality is generally quite a bit different.


I literally would not notice. Or possibly, I would assume they were turning it into an inn so the PCs can rent a room there. I wouldn't assume they were "against" taverns.

Which actually brings up another point: most gaming groups don't have PCs who want to be sex workers (have sex, sure; sell sex, not so much). I'd wager a fair number of gaming groups have at least one PC who would like to put on a show. I would imagine that a music hall actually provides more RP options for players than a brothel would, including PCs who don't imagine their character having sex with a prostitute.

I feel like the whole "Brothel" thing really hits on the idea of "It's not including it, but including it without taking the necessary care to prevent bad or gratuitous usage" point which also applies to slavery.

Some of their ancestors certainly were slaves, unless of course they came to the US after the end of slavery and just don't know that anymore.
And even if, people hardly know how many ancestors were slaves or when they were freed. So how would that affect people today?
Heck, I have ancestry in the Balkans so there is a chance that one or more of my ancestors were enslaved by the Osmans 300 years ago. So what?

I'd wager it doesn't matter to you because you aren't living in the fallout of racially-discriminatory society that arose from the fall of slavery that has continued since then in different forms, whether de jure or de facto.

Quite recently

From a Freelancer: An Open Letter to Erik Mona

Editorial Note from Owen: As someone established in the industry, one of the things I have done before and expect I will do again is to post messages written by other people who, for whatever reaso…

owenkcstephens.com

Did you actually read the post? It says nothing of what you are talking about.

 

[Weiley31]

Here me out: The PCs offer themselves as slaves to the Fire Giants to secure the ransom/pay the price. Then, cue the next segment where the PCs stage an epic break outta jail/Oceans 11/Hogan's Heroes escape from the Fire Giant slave camp. Then the scene ends with the PCs flying off on their Giant Eagle as the Fire Giants stamp on the ground realizing how they have been bamboozled.

 

[HammerMan]

You would be surprised. There are no legal brothels in the UK and sex workers are criminalised. Any depiction of sex work in a TV show would lead to it being considered unsuitable for children and shown after the watershed.

And the UK is far from the most conservative country in the world. Ever been to Ireland?

never been out of the US actually... what is watershed?