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]

No, it isn't assuming that.

It's assuming that a constant deluge of stereotypes in every form of media we consume slowly but inexorably influences people and leaves them open to increasingly hurtful beliefs.

Avoiding those stereotypes in D&D won't solve the problem, but neither will refraining from chucking your McDonald's bag out your car window clean up the environment.

It also means people reading about orcs won't go "HOLY HELL THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT MY ANCESTORS!!!".

Because literally, in 5E, presumably now errata'd out, but prior to that, there was stuff about orcs which was practically identical to stuff in racist textbooks from the mid-century and earlier (and in some disturbing cases, much later).

 

[Justice and Rule]

Well, if there was ever a sign Dark Sun is going to be significantly different when it's finally released, I think this is it.

I mean, maybe? Attitudes and opinions change over time. I think Deadlands is a pretty good example of that. Though in the case of this, I think part of the problem is that to change a rather egregious situation in PFS, they made it so that it had to have a "storyline solution". Part of the problem is that trying to solve it with a "storyline" is doing the exact same thing that frustrated people before. There's context and baggage about doing it "in-universe" that is part of the problem in that situation.

As to whether or not WOTC could do a good enough job explaining slavery within Dark Sun... I mean, probably not. It's always been a beloved but niche setting for a reason.

 

[Ixal]

Well afaik serfs didn't gold sold as such but I'm sure one can find examples if you look hard enough.

At uni I saw a photo of serfs being used as beasts if burden dragging a barge up the Volga river.

If I had the choice I would ask where and when for the slave part.

Not directly, but serfs were tied to their land and the land got traded.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Not directly, but serfs were tied to their land and the land got traded.

Sometimes during times of strife, serfs would learn martial arts and become...

 

[Zardnaar]

Not directly, but serfs were tied to their land and the land got traded.

Yeah figured as much. They were tied to the land but not generally sold as such afaik but I'm sure exceptions happened.

 

[Staffan]

As to whether or not WOTC could do a good enough job explaining slavery within Dark Sun... I mean, probably not. It's always been a beloved but niche setting for a reason.

That's a hard nut to crack. Slavery is a HUGE part of Dark Sun, to the point where the intro adventure in the original box starts the PCs off as slaves and the first published adventure has the characters enslaved in the first part and then they spend the rest of the adventure working in the slave pits (with the adventuring stuff in between). I think a slavery-less Dark Sun would be to do the setting a huge disservice.

I mean, for me who has been living most of my life on easy-mode privilege-wise (white, cis, male, straight, living in one of the richest countries in the world), fictional slavery is... well, spicy is not the right word, but it's close. Playing a character who's a slave, or running a game where the PCs are slaves, can be fun if it leads to breaking free and hopefully extracting vengeance and maybe even overthrow the system that allows slavery. If the game world starts out being perfect, there's not much room for the PCs to make it better. At the same time, I recognize that for many people, slavery is not an abstract evil – it's a very concrete evil their not-that-distant ancestors were subjected to, and it would be super uncomfortable for them even with slavery shown as utterly evil, and even with slavery being locally abolished at the end of that first published adventure.

I don't know how to reconcile these things. The best ideas I can come up with are (a) give up – it's too much of a minefield, or (b) put the mother of all trigger/content warnings on the products.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

When they say Pathfinder isn't going to have slavery anymore, do they mean as an institution or forced labor in general? If the latter it will be a bit...suspension of disbelief breaking to never have any bad guys ever forcing people they've abducted to mine for an evil artifact or whatever unless villains never ever take prisoners.

Duergar exist in their setting, right? I'm curious to see if they radically change duergar lore or just never reference them again.

 

[DarkCrisis]

That's a hard nut to crack. Slavery is a HUGE part of Dark Sun, to the point where the intro adventure in the original box starts the PCs off as slaves and the first published adventure has the characters enslaved in the first part and then they spend the rest of the adventure working in the slave pits (with the adventuring stuff in between). I think a slavery-less Dark Sun would be to do the setting a huge disservice.

I mean, for me who has been living most of my life on easy-mode privilege-wise (white, cis, male, straight, living in one of the richest countries in the world), fictional slavery is... well, spicy is not the right word, but it's close. Playing a character who's a slave, or running a game where the PCs are slaves, can be fun if it leads to breaking free and hopefully extracting vengeance and maybe even overthrow the system that allows slavery. If the game world starts out being perfect, there's not much room for the PCs to make it better. At the same time, I recognize that for many people, slavery is not an abstract evil – it's a very concrete evil their not-that-distant ancestors were subjected to, and it would be super uncomfortable for them even with slavery shown as utterly evil, and even with slavery being locally abolished at the end of that first published adventure.

I don't know how to reconcile these things. The best ideas I can come up with are (a) give up – it's too much of a minefield, or (b) put the mother of all trigger/content warnings on the products.

Same way they do everything. With a heavy handed change. “And slavery was defeated forever, but life is still hard and the land still dying in the Realm of Dark Sun.

 

[Mecheon]

Or make them proper demonspawns instead of humanoids.

They've been humanoid longer than demonspawn. And playable longer

Heck, didn't Mystara have a "Here's the place where the gnolls and the elves just, live together and chill"?

 

[Yenrak]

Why was "mad monkey fever" changed to "blue mist fever" in Tomb of Annihilation?