D&D 5E WotC Apologises For Missing Cultural Consultant Credit in Strixhaven

In the initial printing of Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos, the credit for Tanya DePass’ (who recently ran the hugely successful Kickstarter for the Afrofuturist RPG Into the Mother Lands, and founded the organisation I Need Diverse Games) role as cultural consultant was omitted. WotC has apologised and promises that the credit will be included in future printings.

The first print run of #Strixhaven missed a crucial credit - the consulting work by @cypheroftyr. We publicly apologize to Tanya for the omission, as we have privately. Future printings will include her credit. See the attached page w/ updated credits already available digitally.

We also failed at communicating this update appropriately. We apologize for both our communication failure and for making the initial credit mistake in the first place.

Thank you to all of our fans for pointing out our mistakes so that we can correct them. We hope our error doesn’t diminish any enjoyment of the work all our teams have put into making #Strixhaven the best it could be.

 

[Hussar]

In any creative field credits are hugely important. This is why every Hollywood union/guild includes demands for credit acknowledgement on a film/tv show - credit acknowledgement (or lack of it) can make or break a career.

Apropos of nothing, I was noodling around the Internet the other day and saw a trivia bit that stated that it was George Lucas and Star Wars that first posted end scene credits thanking every single person who worked on the film. Before that it was just typically department heads. Dunno if it was true, but, seemed interesting.

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Good to see WotC catch a mistake, publicly offer a mea culpa and make it right as soon as possible with minimum of fuss. Well done them.

 

[cowpie]

Apropos of nothing, I was noodling around the Internet the other day and saw a trivia bit that stated that it was George Lucas and Star Wars that first posted end scene credits thanking every single person who worked on the film. Before that it was just typically department heads. Dunno if it was true, but, seemed interesting.

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Good to see WotC catch a mistake, publicly offer a mea culpa and make it right as soon as possible with minimum of fuss. Well done them.

Lucas was one of the first to demand full credits at the end of the film. Before that, union rules required credits run at the start of the film, for department heads, to ensure the audience would see them, since they usually didn't stick around to watch the end credits. This enabled Lucas to show the start credits, opening serial story crawl, and jump right into the action at the start of each film.

He ended up paying hefty (ie: multi-million dollar) fines to the unions when he did this for empire strikes back & ROTJ, partially due to some hollywood politics and double-dealing by 20th Century Fox. This is why he took Raiders of the Lost Ark to Paramount, instead of Fox, to get back at them. Fox then got revenge, by announcing that anyone directing ROTJ would be banned from the Director's Guild, so Spielberg had to bow out, and Lucas had to go outside the guild to get a director, hence his courting David Lynch (who declined) and ending up with hiring Richard Marquand.

 

[Jer]

Apropos of nothing, I was noodling around the Internet the other day and saw a trivia bit that stated that it was George Lucas and Star Wars that first posted end scene credits thanking every single person who worked on the film. Before that it was just typically department heads. Dunno if it was true, but, seemed interesting.

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Good to see WotC catch a mistake, publicly offer a mea culpa and make it right as soon as possible with minimum of fuss. Well done them.

I hadn't heard that, though the timing would be about right. The 70s were when American films started listing more and more credits for folks as a standard practice - older movies usually have the barest of credits.

I do know that Lucas famously got fined a quarter of a million dollars and quit the Director's Guild for doing credits "wrong" on Empire Strikes Back. The Director's Guild requirements were (and still are actually) that if there were credits that listed names at the front of the movie then the Director's name had to come first.

Lucas wanted the movie to open like Star Wars did - production company logo, then "Long time ago" then title then scroll then movie - no credits. Except that since his name was the production company logo - LucasFilm - the Director's Guild said that was a breach of the union agreement and fined him. (Star Wars was fine because Lucas was the director, but he didn't direct Empire so they fined him). Lucas paid the fine and quit the guild (which caused problems for him when he needed a director for RotJ - he had to hire a non-guild director and that's why he couldn't get Steven Speilberg to do it as he'd planned. Imagine the world where Steven Spielberg directed Return of the Jedi...)

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Because of money issues I can't afford the book right now, bad,bad year thanks to my father's heart attack last year and malfunctioning stint. What did they need a cultural consultant for and what cultural?

 

[Charlaquin]

Big oversight, but a good apology, complete with acknowledgment of what they did and why it was wrong, expression of contrition for what they did wrong, and a plan of action to set it right. And it looks like she accepted the apology. Bummer that it happened, but good to see the matter was settled quickly and amicably.

 

[cowpie]

Because of money issues I can't afford the book right now, bad,bad year thanks to my father's heart attack last year and malfunctioning stint. What did they need a cultural consultant for and what cultural?

To ensure diverse representation in artwork and text (ie: to make sure they had all the genders, ethnicities, orientations). She has a non-profit that advertises her services as a cultural consultant for RPGs and videogames, though she is pretty open on her website on being a Diversity Equity and Inclusion advocate, and an intersectional feminist, so her consultancy pretty openly advocates for those political positions.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Big oversight, but a good apology, complete with acknowledgment of what they did and why it was wrong, expression of contrition for what they did wrong, and a plan of action to set it right. And it looks like she accepted the apology. Bummer that it happened, but good to see the matter was settled quickly and amicably.

It's good that they apologized this quickly, too. The book just came out two days ago, and they already acknowledged that they made a mistake.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's good that they apologized this quickly, too. The book just came out two days ago, and they already acknowledged that they made a mistake.

Unrelated, but I dig the new profile picture.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Unrelated, but I dig the new profile picture.

Nice to find another person that appreciates the best monster in D&D 5e

 

[Parmandur]

Wow, that's embarrassing, but good work making it right.