D&D: Van Richten’s Guide Makes Monsters Terrifying
Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft brings horror to D&D by changing up classic monsters like zombies and werewolves in horrifying new ways.
Let’s talk about monsters. One of the ways Dungeons & Dragons carves out its adventuring niche is by drawing on classic monsters from throughout mythology. If you’ve played D&D by now, you’re probably already familiar with what it’s like fighting zombies or werewolves, or maaaaybe starspawn.
That last one is a little more rare, but almost every adventurer knows what it’s like to fight a zombie–you roll and you have to either crit or there’s a chance they just keep on fighting. Or if you’re fighting a werewolf, bring a silver weapon and also a cleric who can cast remove curse. There’s not a lot of mystery to these monsters, fights against them tend to feel straightforward. But Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft wants to change that.
After all, one of the greatest fears is of the unknown, so when you drop one of the many new monsters from Van Richten’s Guide onto your tabletop, your players will discover that not every monster is a pushover.
Though some definitely are.
But what I love about this is that the book isn’t mean. It’s not a nod back to the gotcha! days of D&D when Gary Gygax would keep the Tomb of Horrors ever at his side in a briefcase, ready to browbeat players who couldn’t solve his insta-death riddles. Instead, the book turns to one of the best things about D&D: its love affair with mythology.
Van Richten’s Guide draws on a lot of classic monster lore. These are things that are sort of in the collective subconscious about things like werewolves or zombies, whether that’s knowledge gained from stories or more modern myths like movies and tv shows. For instance, take the Loup Garou.
On the surface, this is another werewolf, but bigger and tougher and he hits a little harder. But the Loup Garou draws on a much broader idea of a werewolf. All of the classic tropes around werewolves come out to play:
- They might curse you and you don’t know
- The only way to cure the curse is by killing the werewolf that bit you
- The curse turns you into a monstrous beast every full moon
All of these are present in the lore and abilities of the Loup Garou. Its bite can give you lycanthropy, its claws will knock you prone, it regenerates and is chock full of legendary resistances and reactions will let it fight the entire party at once. Which, if you’re cursed, you might have to deal with when one of your friends is cursed.
And this brings us to the first big change. The Loup Garou curse is particularly strong. In order to even attempt to remove the curse, you must first kill the Loup Garou that inflicted you with it. It’s the whole “gotta kill the head werewolf” story but realized here. And even then, once you kill the Loup Garou that bit you, you can only attempt to remove the curse–the target must still make a con save in order to remove the curse.
That’s just one of the monsters. But Van Richten’s Guide sets its eyes on much broader mythology as well, drawing from movies like World War Z and even The Thing to inspire its monsters. Let’s take a look at the Starspawn now. The Starspawn Emissary is basically the thing from The Thing.
Yes that is an amalgamation of tentacles and faces. No I cant unsee it either.
The Emissary shares much of its movie counterpart’s abilities. It can appear in a lesser or greater form, and that matters because which form it appears in changes its abilities. While it’s in its lesser form, it can teleport, it can shift its form into any creature, like a rabbit or a wolf or even another humanoid.
Starspawn Emissaries are also telepathic, and can read your mind and speak any language. And that’s just their lesser form. Anything or anyone could be a Starspawn Emissary, and this monster is deadly. Even the lesser form is CR 19. Without spoiling too much, this is the perfect high level monster that will horrify your players. It’s not meant to be fought at low levels so much as overcome or outwitted.
But we mentioned World War Z, and would be remiss if we didn’t stop and mention the new zombies in Van Richten’s Guide. Let us leave you with one last monster, the Zombie Clot, which is very much the cluster of zombies taken from the movie World War Z.
All of this, and more, awaits you in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.
Happy Adventuring!
