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.

 

[Malmuria]

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.

Well that’s not really a function of anyone’s age. Finding a ttrpg group and keeping it together has always been difficult; at least now we have the internet and some mainstream acceptability. Further, anyone who wants to play an indie game, including young people, will have a more difficult time due to the popularity of 5e. I mean, if you find the 5e base game to be ok, but just don’t like the books released in the last year, there’s a wealth of 3rd party material coming out that should suit you.

 

[Justice and Rule]

And? Is playing an Evil PC not an option?

It's not a common or assumed one, and generally speaking things designed for evil PCs to interact with are generally called out as such. In this case, it frames it as the easiest option to be used as well. Conceptually speaking it should probably be handled with more care than a flippant throwaway mention.

 

[AtomicPope]

I'm glad they made the change to the Drow. In my own campaign I had to tell a new player that the book is incorrect, and I wasn't making a house rule. It was important for an all-Elf campaign that ventured into the Underdark, where there were no campaign designs in traveling to Menzoberranzan. Not to mention, dealings were the Drow were not default "bad". To better explore the different aspects of the Elven peoples I wanted to show them all in a favorable light. By the same token, Dwarves were shat upon.

 

[pukunui]

So...so what? Nobody is going to say slave trading is acceptable, noble, good, but...if you are dealing with slavers, why would that NOT be an option?

Like really, looking at Volo's and the section in question.

They want payment.
They want payment not in treasure, but in ore, metal, or, different slaves, because Fire Giants, take and use slaves.

So.freaking.what? Dont like it? Go kill the Fire Giants, free the slaves, and take their loot!

Hell, there is a whole section RIGHT ABOVE THE PART REMOVED, detailing why they have slaves.

My guess is that it was more the unfairness of wealthy people being ransomed rather than poor people that caused that bit to get cut but not the rest of it.

Its still there no? I swear its in one of the books.

Nope. The kingdom collapsed after the orcs were defeated during the War of the Silver Marches. Obould himself died sometime in the midst of the 3e-4e time jump.

 

[Strider1973]

Personally, I don't have any problem with the "moral changes", rather, I'm welcoming them. I'm 48, I've been playing D&D and many other TTRPG since 1985, I've got two kids who are becoming very interested in D&D, and I want it to be as inclusive as possible. Is it just a smart commercial move of WoTC? I don't care, I appreciate it. Paizo has done exactly the same thing with Pathfinder 2e. If your table wants to play "extreme" campaigns you're always free to do it, at your own responsibility and according to your own sensitivity, but I really appreciate that the base, standard game, is open and inclusive, removing "moral labels" on ancestries and similar things.

 

[teitan]

Which was a common take already in a lot of corners of the Internet, given how antiquated a lot of the Volo's takes were. So it's not a huge leap to canonize it as officially Volo's biased perspective, while not actually changing anything for the people who like it as-is.

I kind of think it's unnecessary to put a disclaimer since the DMG is all about how it's the DM's world and the books are just ideas you can use if you want to include them but that would require people to read the DMG and especially the world building section and reviewers to quit saying "You don't need to read this book" when yes, yes you do if you've never DMed before.

 

[teitan]

Personally, I don't have any problem with the "moral changes", rather, I'm welcoming them. I'm 48, I've been playing D&D and many other TTRPG since 1985, I've got two kids who are becoming very interested in D&D, and I want it to be as inclusive as possible. Is it just a smart commercial move of WoTC? I don't care, I appreciate it. Paizo has done exactly the same thing with Pathfinder 2e. If your table wants to play "extreme" campaigns you're always free to do it, at your own responsibility and according to your own sensitivity, but I really appreciate that the base, standard game, is open and inclusive, removing "moral labels" on ancestries and similar things.

Here here! I agree 100%. I think WOTC is actually trying to play a bit of catch up with Paizo on that front and hitting a few notes a bit too hard like people who were trying to catch up to Sabbath and Coven and should have been doing their own thing instead because they were really good at that thing. Keep plowing forward and making progress though, it takes time to find that right balance!

 

[Fifinjir]

Aren't beholder's incorrigible narcissists that care for nothing but themselves and are utterly incapable of considering the wellbeing of others up to and including breeding their own destruction?

Fifinjir, I've got some terrible news to share about the last two years...

That was, admittedly, kind of funny. But in my defense beholder where conceived some time before reality became a bad Political Cartoon series.

Tired now, I’ll say more tomorrow if I have anything to say.

 

[Ranger REG]

Will the errata be incorporated into the D&D Beyond ebooks?

I hope we're all given the option to apply or not.

 

[JEB]

Will the errata be incorporated into the D&D Beyond ebooks?

Yes. And according to some posts on the dndnext Reddit, new copies of the PHB are already displaying the changes, so I assume D&D Beyond will be updating its versions of the books imminently.

I hope we're all given the option to apply or not.

I'm afraid you won't. If you want to preserve the removed/changed material, I advise you save the text down yourself as soon as possible.