According to the Player’s Handbook, Drow no longer have to be evil in your D&D game

There’s been a lot of talk recently about fantasy racism in D&D (and plenty of other fantasy games), some of it by us. So when I saw that Wizards of the Coast has published an errata for the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook that addresses the Drow — a race of elves that have traditionally had an evil alignment — I was very curious to see what Wizards had in store for the elves of the Underdark.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, WotC followed its own advice. As was suggested in the company’s post last summer about diversity issues in D&D, the company is taking an approach to Drow that we’ve seen in recent sourcebooks like Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount: now Drow are simply another race shaped by setting and circumstance rather than just being evil elves. Can Drow be evil? Of course. But it’s no longer the defining characteristic of their race. This change will now be part of the 5e Player’s Handbook. As Jeremy Crawford, Principal Rules Designer of Dungeons & Dragons, puts it:

This new text replaces a description that confused the culture of Menzoberranzan—a city in the grip of Lolth’s cult in the Forgotten Realms—with drow themselves. The new text more accurately describes the place of drow in the D&D multiverse and correctly situates them among the other branches of the elf family, each of which was shaped by an environment in the earliest days of the multiverse: forests (wood elves), places of ancient magic on the Material Plane (high elves), oceans (sea elves), the Feywild (eladrin), the Shadowfell (shadar-kai), and the Underdark (drow). Drow are united by an ancestral connection to the Underdark, not by worship of Lolth—a god some of them have never heard of.

Now, is this a retcon? Yes. It absolutely is a retcon. It wasn’t that the original description of Drow was confused, it simply made the blanket statement that all Drow were followers of the evil goddess Lolth. I played through the original modules that featured the Drow — the Against the Giants and Queen of the Demonweb Pits modules — back in the day. At the time, the Underdark that’s home to the modern Drow wasn’t even a specific thing: it came into existence later during the Forgotten Realms campaign setting’s rise to prominence. In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, all Drow were evil and worshipped Lolth and that’s just how things were.

But D&D has evolved over the years, and all Drow aren’t covered by the PHB’s original generalizations on the race. Drow on worlds like Eberron or Krynn don’t even know who Lolth is, so why should they be seen as intrinsically corrupted by her influence? This was always canon — on Eberron, the Drow worship Vulkoor the scorpion god, not Lolth. Since we’re seeing more lore tying together the D&D multiverse, it only makes sense to alter the Drow to more easily fit into that conception and take the differences between various Drow cultures into account.

Even though this retcons some previous content, it’s a great retcon. Making it so that Drow, like High Elves or Wood Elves or any other Elves, are simply adapted to their environment instead of all being cursed by the Elven gods because Lolth tried to kill her husband — no, seriously, that was the lore for a long while — is a really great decision. Frankly, the idea of an entire group of people being just plain evil is terrible, and WotC seems to recognize this as it works to address problems with fantasy racism in the game. I’m super excited for this new lore to make its way into D&D, and see what the game does with future Drow stories.

And this change doesn’t take away from D&D’s storytelling options. The evil Lolth-worshipping Drow haven’t gone anywhere — you can still use them as villains in your game if you want to. But now you can officially have Drow NPCs or PC’s who hate Lolth as much as anybody and it’s right there in the PHB to back you up.

So it’s a retcon, but it’s a really good retcon, and I’m super excited for it. Hopefully we’ll see similar descriptions for Orcs, various Goblin races, Kobolds, and other races previously depicted as “just plain evil” in earlier editions of D&D, giving players and DMs more options as to how they treat their characters.