The newest Dungeons & Dragons supplement, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, includes resources for horror-themed campaigns, including tools to help DMs create a zombie apocalypse. The undead is a staple of the horror genre, and so it is great to see that this book has really risen to the occasion by giving new (un)life to some of the game’s deadliest monsters.
In fact, one way that this new book proves so innovative is that it draws upon zombie cinema, taking inspiration from both old classics and more sensationalist modern films. Both players and DMs will be eager to sink their teeth into this new horror supplement.
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It only makes sense that Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft would have a strong focus on the undead since the entire Ravenloft campaign setting was created by Tracy and Laura Hickman when they set out to make an adventure that imbued an undead villain with a sense of terrifying menace. Their original homebrew campaign focused on the vampire Strahd and was so popular that Wizards of the Coast eventually published it, whereupon it quickly became a fan favorite. Van Richten‘s includes almost every type of horror genre one can imagine, but it takes extra care when dealing with the undead. The book’s two new subclasses follow this trend by allowing Bards to conjure spirits and Warlocks to make pacts with beings such as Dracoliches and Mummy Lords.
Since “Monsters of Ravenloft” is the last chapter in Van Richten’s and the chapter is organized alphabetically, that means the best is saved for last as this D&D supplement quite literally closes the book on Zombies. It specifically includes three new types of Zombie, each with its own stat block. However, rather than focus on individual shambling corpses as other books have done, these three are each designed to highlight the terror of masses of undead hordes working in unison to spread terror throughout the apocalypse. There is even a Zombie Apocalypse table to roll for different encounter types.
The first of these is Swarm of Zombie Limbs, which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of severed disembodied appendages all moving on their own, clawing and grasping blindly. The Swarm can pin adventurers to the ground, restraining them if they fail their strength saving throw. The Zombie Clot is a huge towering entity composed of numerous zombies all smooshed together to form a single giant entity, such as was depicted in Marc Forster’s 2013 film World War Z. Zombie Clots make multi attacks as their standard attack action and can hurl multiple zombies from their larger mass to entomb any creature within 30 feet. Finally, the Zombie Plague Spreader is a lone undead capable of infecting nearby creatures with its virulent miasma, dealing necrotic damage in all directions. Anyone who dies after being infected will be resurrected as a zombie one minute later.
This is not the first time that zombies have been central to the Ravenloft setting. The Curse of Strahd campaign features the infamous “Strahd Zombies.” When an arm or leg is cut from a “Strahd Zombie,” the appendage will continue to operate on its own (and apparently become part of a Swarm of Zombie Limbs if not dealt with immediately). These terrifying creatures subvert player expectations by operating outside the usual behavior of zombies, making for a truly terrifying encounter. When combined with the zombies from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, DMs and players will be able to create some truly apocalyptic stories.
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