lets put it in dnd terms if a wizard was editing all of the books to his liking with this be a hero or a villain.
I can think of few things more dangerous and ripe for abuse than editing books. Sure this is just a silly game but you are normalizing a very dangerous form of censorship and oppression you need to stop this it’s wrong. Can you imagine what the world would be like if people and power were able to edit books to their Liking.
this is a steppingstone to fascism stop normalizing this if you care about freedom and democracy.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing) You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
let out it ins dnd terms if a wizard was editing all of the books to his liking with this be a hero or a villain.
I can think of few things more dangerous and ripe for abuse than editing books. Sure this is just a silly game but you are normalizing a very dangerous form of censorship and oppression you need to stop this it’s wrong. Can you imagine what the world would be like if people and power were able to edit books to their Liking.
this is a steppingstone to fascism stop normalizing this if you care about freedom and democracy.
For an accurate analogy, it would be an example of a wizard revising books they themselves authored for future reprints. How is that oppression of anyone??? A wizard using their power to edit or censor other author's books is an abuse of power and dangerous. But that's not happening here.
Moving from analogy to reality, it is their book they are editing, and it is something that has been happening since D&D existed (and also goes far, far beyond D&D books). Publishers revise their books all the time. It's their right to do so. The problem arises when someone uses their authority to edit or censor another author/publisher's book. As someone who teaches ethics, I assure you, the two situations are vastly, vastly different. Claiming a publisher revising one of their own books in future reprints is a step towards fascism is actually belittling towards the very real steps towards fascism occurring in the attacks on libraries and schools right now.
Abusing authority to silence others is a step towards fascism.
Becoming better informed and improving your own work is not. That's called "learning from your mistakes" and is actually a good thing.
First off I 100% agree with the OP. Censorship is bad. Second I dont see why they cant just make a copy of the book label it "censored version" and leave the original up there so we have a choice on what we get. Copy paste edit shouldn't take too long. And that way everyone is happy and gets what they want.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
When death comes for you, make that bastard work for it.
let out it ins dnd terms if a wizard was editing all of the books to his liking with this be a hero or a villain.
I can think of few things more dangerous and ripe for abuse than editing books. Sure this is just a silly game but you are normalizing a very dangerous form of censorship and oppression you need to stop this it’s wrong. Can you imagine what the world would be like if people and power were able to edit books to their Liking.
this is a steppingstone to fascism stop normalizing this if you care about freedom and democracy.
I mean, I'm just a dude wanting you to get done with your order so I can see if the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger is still available at this location, but while the cashier says "whaa?" to you, I'll engage for the TikTok likes....
1.) The owner of a text editing a text isn't censorship.
2.) How precisely is anyone being "oppressed" by this? If they want to make the Hadozee a slave race in (albeit very rough) line with prior lore in your game, no one will stop you. Authors and rights owners of books revise them all the time. The present Hadozee has the same level of lore all the other species in Spelljammer have, in line with MMM.
3.) The closest thing a private enterprise has to democracy is "the marketplace". It looks like in this instance D&D wished to retain its position in the marketplace via an editorial position.
You know this isn't the first time changes like these have been made in 5e, right? So we're not talking unprecedented at all, but continued practice. Functionally 5e is a "living rules" system that DDB particularly enables to always be updateable. It's not a flaw, it's actually a feature.
let out it ins dnd terms if a wizard was editing all of the books to his liking with this be a hero or a villain.
I can think of few things more dangerous and ripe for abuse than editing books. Sure this is just a silly game but you are normalizing a very dangerous form of censorship and oppression you need to stop this it’s wrong. Can you imagine what the world would be like if people and power were able to edit books to their Liking.
this is a steppingstone to fascism stop normalizing this if you care about freedom and democracy.
For an accurate analogy, it would be an example of a wizard revising books they themselves authored for future reprints. How is that oppression of anyone??? A wizard using their power to edit or censor other author's books is an abuse of power and dangerous. But that's not happening here.
Moving from analogy to reality, it is their book they are editing, and it is something that has been happening since D&D existed (and also goes far, far beyond D&D books). Publishers revise their books all the time. It's their right to do so. The problem arises when someone uses their authority to edit or censor another author/publisher's book. As someone who teaches ethics, I assure you, the two situations are vastly, vastly different. Claiming a publisher revising one of their own books in future reprints is a step towards fascism is actually belittling towards the very real steps towards fascism occurring in the attacks on libraries and schools right now.
Abusing authority to silence others is a step towards fascism.
Becoming better informed and improving your own work is not. That's called "learning from your mistakes" and is actually a good thing.
Hear hear!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
This is not your intellectual property by the way, this is Wizard's. They have every right to write their books however they want, just as you have every right to edit your own works. This is freedom of speech. This is private property. This is the United States of America where other people's right are just as important and equal to yours (or at least in theory).
If you do not like it, take your wallet elsewhere. Or you know, start your own business and create your own intellectual property like a true entrepreneurial American.
But it’s not a re-print, they are digitally altering something with no recorded of the change. Sure it’s nothing really important it’s just a game but it makes it easier and normalizes it when some one wants to “update” something that is important. It’s a very slippery Slope and it’s Corporation not a single author making the call, what happens when Amazon who owns plenty of intellectual property decides to remove any pro union messages in books or alter them to be anti union, with no record…It easier now because of things like this.
there should at least be a footnote and a record of the change for historical purposes. It’s important that books show us where we’ve been they are not meant to be living documents.
WotC fixing something in their book (especially if it's something that their fans ask for) is not a slippery slope to fascism. And this is coming from the most anti-fascist person you'll find in this thread.
If I edit a post to fix a typo, that's not a slippery slope to fascism, just like errata and fixing of mechanics and lore in books that WotC made isn't fascism. Editing a post or book because people ask you to isn't fascism, either, because fascism is when people (typically the government or a religion) are trying to force you to censor yourself in order to control your language.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Most of Amazon's IP has nothing to do with the books they sell (except for the stuff on Kindle, and that still isn't the authorship). Amazon could stop carrying pro-union books, as could any other seller. What they can't do is alter the content of copyrighted works for which they don't own the copyrights. Wizards owns the rights to these books. The changes they are choosing to make are not in any way erasing history. I don't believe they are recalling or destroying any remaining copies of the discontinued books, nor did they delete the digital content for those of us who had already purchased it.
It's also worth noting that they have been pretty up front about most of the changes they were going to make and why they were making them in regards to Tasha's, MMM, etc. While it may not have seemed like much time, DDB did announce that the two older books would no longer be for sale, so there was notice these changes were coming and their are still many places where there is 'historical' record for what that's worth. When One D&D launches, they will at some point stop selling the 5e core books, just as they no longer sell 1e, 2e, etc. There has been a great deal of lore that has come and gone and some of it come back again over the various editions. I expect that will continue.
Most of Amazon's IP has nothing to do with the books they sell (except for the stuff on Kindle, and that still isn't the authorship). Amazon could stop carrying pro-union books, as could any other seller. What they can't do is alter the content of copyrighted works for which they don't own the copyrights. Wizards owns the rights to these books. The changes they are choosing to make are not in any way erasing history. I don't believe they are recalling or destroying any remaining copies of the discontinued books, nor did they delete the digital content for those of us who had already purchased it.
It's also worth noting that they have been pretty up front about most of the changes they were going to make and why they were making them in regards to Tasha's, MMM, etc. While it may not have seemed like much time, DDB did announce that the two older books would no longer be for sale, so there was notice these changes were coming and their are still many places where there is 'historical' record for what that's worth. When One D&D launches, they will at some point stop selling the 5e core books, just as they no longer sell 1e, 2e, etc. There has been a great deal of lore that has come and gone and some of it come back again over the various editions. I expect that will continue.
It’s possible to do the wrong the for the right reason. Fixing a typo or Clarifying a rule is different than deleting text from a book they don’t change the meaning and there should still be a record of the change. All censorship is wrong all of the time there is not an exception. It’s important to see where we’ve come from even if some times that’s a hard truth we don’t like to see. If we just edit all of our mistakes away we won’t grow.
Most of Amazon's IP has nothing to do with the books they sell (except for the stuff on Kindle, and that still isn't the authorship). Amazon could stop carrying pro-union books, as could any other seller. What they can't do is alter the content of copyrighted works for which they don't own the copyrights. Wizards owns the rights to these books. The changes they are choosing to make are not in any way erasing history. I don't believe they are recalling or destroying any remaining copies of the discontinued books, nor did they delete the digital content for those of us who had already purchased it.
It's also worth noting that they have been pretty up front about most of the changes they were going to make and why they were making them in regards to Tasha's, MMM, etc. While it may not have seemed like much time, DDB did announce that the two older books would no longer be for sale, so there was notice these changes were coming and their are still many places where there is 'historical' record for what that's worth. When One D&D launches, they will at some point stop selling the 5e core books, just as they no longer sell 1e, 2e, etc. There has been a great deal of lore that has come and gone and some of it come back again over the various editions. I expect that will continue.
Duly noted, although that still isn't anything like the Amazon analogy, and Wizard's isn't erasing any history if they publicly announced the change and that announcement is still publicly available.
Actually, letting racism stand, inadvertent or unconscious as it may have been, is amoral. When you are in a position to stop making a mistake, and you keep doing it, that’s wrong. Fixing something when you’ve been alerted to an error is the only right and moral choice.
And those who might say taking steps to reduce bigotry (again, being charitable and saying it was an accident) in the world is facisim, should really educate themselves about what facisism is.
Editing your mistakes so that your sales product looks professional is literally how you grow. Correcting your mistakes instead of leaving them visible forever out of some sort of warped sense of pride is the adult thing to do.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It’s possible to do the wrong the for the right reason. Fixing a typo or Clarifying a rule is different than deleting text from a book they don’t change the meaning and there should still be a record of the change. All censorship is wrong all of the time there is not an exception. It’s important to see where we’ve come from even if some times that’s a hard truth we don’t like to see. If we just edit all of our mistakes away we won’t grow.
Absurd. Have you ever written a paper for school? Have you ever been given peer review or instructor feedback suggesting edits and corrections where you've made errors? When you do the revision, you don't hold onto your mistakes. This actually happens in the professional writing world too even in spaces like journalism.
I feel you're not really understanding any of the feedback you've been rightly given on your gross misuse of the concepts of censorship, oppression and fascism. You're doing that "internet thing" where rather than expanding your understanding of the matter (as you don't seem to have real grasp of your own operating terms) via folks offering the time and effort to correct your errors, you're instead "fighting back." Basically if you go into something with an argument, and your understanding of the basic terms of your argument is incorrect, you really shouldn't carry the argument further because you have no foundation. See the paragraph above this one about how when corrected, you don't hold onto your mistakes. If you declare 1+1=3, and you're corrected you don't "hold onto" the error to learn from it. You move beyond it.
Again, were you aware that the "event of today" over which you are presumably outraged is actually reflective of long standing WotC and DDB practices?
But it’s not a re-print, they are digitally altering something with no recorded of the change. Sure it’s nothing really important it’s just a game but it makes it easier and normalizes it when some one wants to “update” something that is important. It’s a very slippery Slope and it’s Corporation not a single author making the call, what happens when Amazon who owns plenty of intellectual property decides to remove any pro union messages in books or alter them to be anti union, with no record…It easier now because of things like this.
there should at least be a footnote and a record of the change for historical purposes. It’s important that books show us where we’ve been they are not meant to be living documents.
The intellectual property belongs to the corporation, not the authors, just as how Taylor Swift's early masters belong to Big Machine Records, not Taylor Swift. Just because a company employs a worker to build a car does not mean the car belongs to the worker. If you do not like things the way they are, then leave and do your own thing. Paizo did it and made Pathfinder. Taylor Swift did it and redid her old masters. If ordinary people can watch YouTube and browse the internet to learn to customize and modify their own cars, you can pick up a pencil and write your own homebrew game. No one is going to bust down your door telling you that you cannot have racism, sex, gore, or whatever in your games. I mean, if vomit like FATAL counts as a TTRPG, the standards are so low that you will probably be fine with whatever you homebrew.
If Amazon workers are able to fight and unionize despite Amazon's anti-union efforts, you can gather like minded individuals and start your own game.
Hypothetica the Wizard has retired from adventuring and now writes books – some are about her adventures as best she remembers them, others are about her theories of magic. She has a magical printing press that can mass produce these books and they become quite popular. So popular, in fact, that she is able to invest in improving her magical printing press and now offers her books in two forms. The two forms have some different benefits and drawback going for them – all of which Hypothetica explains to people who buy her books, but among those is Book Type I is forever unchanging, and Book Type II can be updated magically by Hypothetica through the Update Book spell (which can only be targeted on Type II books the caster has written) as she makes new realizations about magical theory or finds evidence that clarifies her recollections of her adventures or, as sometimes happens, she fixes a tpyo.
Both book types are very popular, and she sells them for years. Whenever she has to fix or change something, all of the Book Type II’s are magically fixed, and the existing Book Type I’s are left unchanged, but if she ever winds up printing more Book Type I’s in the future, she will fix them, too. Over the years she casts the Update Book spell dozens of times making hundreds of changes to Book Type II’s she has written, and people keep happily buying both types of books from her.
Then, one day, she makes a change, taking out a paragraph she realizes was wrong to include for whatever reason. Then somebody who specifically bought Book Type II instead of Book Type I, grabs a pitchfork and starts proclaiming outside her tower that she is a villain, an oppressor, and the kingdom will fall to fascism because of that edit she just made (but not the dozens of other edits she’s been making to her own books for years including similar edits to past books for the exact same reason).
But the passerbys just look at the person, scratch their heads, and say, “Uh… what? That’s silly.”
Meanwhile, down the street, a dragon is breathing fire into a library because they had a book that said some dragons are evil and destroy things by breathing fire on them, and then flies off to find other libraries to breathe fire on.
Who is the villain the adventurers should go on a quest to stop?
Edit to add:
Update Book Level 3 Casting Time 24 hours Range/Area Unlimited Components V, S, M* Duration Instantaneous School Transmutation Attack/Save None
You alter the text of all Type II copies of a book that you have authored. This spell has no effect on Type I books or books authored by others.
The spell also produces a stack of parchment on the board used in the casting to make it a Board of Erratum. The parchments list all changes that were made when this spell was cast. The stack of parchment never runs out of copies.
* (a wooden board of at least 2 feet per side left in a publicly accessible location)
lets put it in dnd terms if a wizard was editing all of the books to his liking with this be a hero or a villain.
I can think of few things more dangerous and ripe for abuse than editing books. Sure this is just a silly game but you are normalizing a very dangerous form of censorship and oppression you need to stop this it’s wrong. Can you imagine what the world would be like if people and power were able to edit books to their Liking.
this is a steppingstone to fascism stop normalizing this if you care about freedom and democracy.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
While I agree with the OP, your Wendy's comment has me laughing so hard right now.
Dungeonmastering since 1992!
For an accurate analogy, it would be an example of a wizard revising books they themselves authored for future reprints. How is that oppression of anyone??? A wizard using their power to edit or censor other author's books is an abuse of power and dangerous. But that's not happening here.
Moving from analogy to reality, it is their book they are editing, and it is something that has been happening since D&D existed (and also goes far, far beyond D&D books). Publishers revise their books all the time. It's their right to do so. The problem arises when someone uses their authority to edit or censor another author/publisher's book. As someone who teaches ethics, I assure you, the two situations are vastly, vastly different. Claiming a publisher revising one of their own books in future reprints is a step towards fascism is actually belittling towards the very real steps towards fascism occurring in the attacks on libraries and schools right now.
Abusing authority to silence others is a step towards fascism.
Becoming better informed and improving your own work is not. That's called "learning from your mistakes" and is actually a good thing.
First off I 100% agree with the OP. Censorship is bad. Second I dont see why they cant just make a copy of the book label it "censored version" and leave the original up there so we have a choice on what we get. Copy paste edit shouldn't take too long. And that way everyone is happy and gets what they want.
When death comes for you, make that bastard work for it.
I mean, I'm just a dude wanting you to get done with your order so I can see if the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger is still available at this location, but while the cashier says "whaa?" to you, I'll engage for the TikTok likes....
1.) The owner of a text editing a text isn't censorship.
2.) How precisely is anyone being "oppressed" by this? If they want to make the Hadozee a slave race in (albeit very rough) line with prior lore in your game, no one will stop you. Authors and rights owners of books revise them all the time. The present Hadozee has the same level of lore all the other species in Spelljammer have, in line with MMM.
3.) The closest thing a private enterprise has to democracy is "the marketplace". It looks like in this instance D&D wished to retain its position in the marketplace via an editorial position.
You know this isn't the first time changes like these have been made in 5e, right? So we're not talking unprecedented at all, but continued practice. Functionally 5e is a "living rules" system that DDB particularly enables to always be updateable. It's not a flaw, it's actually a feature.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Hear hear!
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
This is not your intellectual property by the way, this is Wizard's. They have every right to write their books however they want, just as you have every right to edit your own works. This is freedom of speech. This is private property. This is the United States of America where other people's right are just as important and equal to yours (or at least in theory).
If you do not like it, take your wallet elsewhere. Or you know, start your own business and create your own intellectual property like a true entrepreneurial American.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >
But it’s not a re-print, they are digitally altering something with no recorded of the change. Sure it’s nothing really important it’s just a game but it makes it easier and normalizes it when some one wants to “update” something that is important. It’s a very slippery Slope and it’s Corporation not a single author making the call, what happens when Amazon who owns plenty of intellectual property decides to remove any pro union messages in books or alter them to be anti union, with no record…It easier now because of things like this.
there should at least be a footnote and a record of the change for historical purposes. It’s important that books show us where we’ve been they are not meant to be living documents.
WotC fixing something in their book (especially if it's something that their fans ask for) is not a slippery slope to fascism. And this is coming from the most anti-fascist person you'll find in this thread.
If I edit a post to fix a typo, that's not a slippery slope to fascism, just like errata and fixing of mechanics and lore in books that WotC made isn't fascism. Editing a post or book because people ask you to isn't fascism, either, because fascism is when people (typically the government or a religion) are trying to force you to censor yourself in order to control your language.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Most of Amazon's IP has nothing to do with the books they sell (except for the stuff on Kindle, and that still isn't the authorship). Amazon could stop carrying pro-union books, as could any other seller. What they can't do is alter the content of copyrighted works for which they don't own the copyrights. Wizards owns the rights to these books. The changes they are choosing to make are not in any way erasing history. I don't believe they are recalling or destroying any remaining copies of the discontinued books, nor did they delete the digital content for those of us who had already purchased it.
It's also worth noting that they have been pretty up front about most of the changes they were going to make and why they were making them in regards to Tasha's, MMM, etc. While it may not have seemed like much time, DDB did announce that the two older books would no longer be for sale, so there was notice these changes were coming and their are still many places where there is 'historical' record for what that's worth. When One D&D launches, they will at some point stop selling the 5e core books, just as they no longer sell 1e, 2e, etc. There has been a great deal of lore that has come and gone and some of it come back again over the various editions. I expect that will continue.
I believe the OP is probably referring to this recent incident: https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/statement-hadozee
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
It’s possible to do the wrong the for the right reason. Fixing a typo or Clarifying a rule is different than deleting text from a book they don’t change the meaning and there should still be a record of the change. All censorship is wrong all of the time there is not an exception. It’s important to see where we’ve come from even if some times that’s a hard truth we don’t like to see. If we just edit all of our mistakes away we won’t grow.
Duly noted, although that still isn't anything like the Amazon analogy, and Wizard's isn't erasing any history if they publicly announced the change and that announcement is still publicly available.
Actually, letting racism stand, inadvertent or unconscious as it may have been, is amoral. When you are in a position to stop making a mistake, and you keep doing it, that’s wrong.
Fixing something when you’ve been alerted to an error is the only right and moral choice.
And those who might say taking steps to reduce bigotry (again, being charitable and saying it was an accident) in the world is facisim, should really educate themselves about what facisism is.
Editing your mistakes so that your sales product looks professional is literally how you grow. Correcting your mistakes instead of leaving them visible forever out of some sort of warped sense of pride is the adult thing to do.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Absurd. Have you ever written a paper for school? Have you ever been given peer review or instructor feedback suggesting edits and corrections where you've made errors? When you do the revision, you don't hold onto your mistakes. This actually happens in the professional writing world too even in spaces like journalism.
I feel you're not really understanding any of the feedback you've been rightly given on your gross misuse of the concepts of censorship, oppression and fascism. You're doing that "internet thing" where rather than expanding your understanding of the matter (as you don't seem to have real grasp of your own operating terms) via folks offering the time and effort to correct your errors, you're instead "fighting back." Basically if you go into something with an argument, and your understanding of the basic terms of your argument is incorrect, you really shouldn't carry the argument further because you have no foundation. See the paragraph above this one about how when corrected, you don't hold onto your mistakes. If you declare 1+1=3, and you're corrected you don't "hold onto" the error to learn from it. You move beyond it.
Again, were you aware that the "event of today" over which you are presumably outraged is actually reflective of long standing WotC and DDB practices?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Words mean things and I think the OP is being extremely careless with their choice of words.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
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Check out my life-changing
The intellectual property belongs to the corporation, not the authors, just as how Taylor Swift's early masters belong to Big Machine Records, not Taylor Swift. Just because a company employs a worker to build a car does not mean the car belongs to the worker. If you do not like things the way they are, then leave and do your own thing. Paizo did it and made Pathfinder. Taylor Swift did it and redid her old masters. If ordinary people can watch YouTube and browse the internet to learn to customize and modify their own cars, you can pick up a pencil and write your own homebrew game. No one is going to bust down your door telling you that you cannot have racism, sex, gore, or whatever in your games. I mean, if vomit like FATAL counts as a TTRPG, the standards are so low that you will probably be fine with whatever you homebrew.
If Amazon workers are able to fight and unionize despite Amazon's anti-union efforts, you can gather like minded individuals and start your own game.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >
You know, let's put this in D&D terms...
Hypothetica the Wizard has retired from adventuring and now writes books – some are about her adventures as best she remembers them, others are about her theories of magic. She has a magical printing press that can mass produce these books and they become quite popular. So popular, in fact, that she is able to invest in improving her magical printing press and now offers her books in two forms. The two forms have some different benefits and drawback going for them – all of which Hypothetica explains to people who buy her books, but among those is Book Type I is forever unchanging, and Book Type II can be updated magically by Hypothetica through the Update Book spell (which can only be targeted on Type II books the caster has written) as she makes new realizations about magical theory or finds evidence that clarifies her recollections of her adventures or, as sometimes happens, she fixes a tpyo.
Both book types are very popular, and she sells them for years. Whenever she has to fix or change something, all of the Book Type II’s are magically fixed, and the existing Book Type I’s are left unchanged, but if she ever winds up printing more Book Type I’s in the future, she will fix them, too. Over the years she casts the Update Book spell dozens of times making hundreds of changes to Book Type II’s she has written, and people keep happily buying both types of books from her.
Then, one day, she makes a change, taking out a paragraph she realizes was wrong to include for whatever reason. Then somebody who specifically bought Book Type II instead of Book Type I, grabs a pitchfork and starts proclaiming outside her tower that she is a villain, an oppressor, and the kingdom will fall to fascism because of that edit she just made (but not the dozens of other edits she’s been making to her own books for years including similar edits to past books for the exact same reason).
But the passerbys just look at the person, scratch their heads, and say, “Uh… what? That’s silly.”
Meanwhile, down the street, a dragon is breathing fire into a library because they had a book that said some dragons are evil and destroy things by breathing fire on them, and then flies off to find other libraries to breathe fire on.
Who is the villain the adventurers should go on a quest to stop?
Edit to add:
Update Book
Level 3
Casting Time 24 hours
Range/Area Unlimited
Components V, S, M*
Duration Instantaneous
School Transmutation
Attack/Save None
You alter the text of all Type II copies of a book that you have authored. This spell has no effect on Type I books or books authored by others.
The spell also produces a stack of parchment on the board used in the casting to make it a Board of Erratum. The parchments list all changes that were made when this spell was cast. The stack of parchment never runs out of copies.
* (a wooden board of at least 2 feet per side left in a publicly accessible location)