Let’s Play D&D With ‘Blade’
This week we’re staying up all night to crawl through dungeons and fight vampites as we figure out how to add Blade to our next D&D session.
With the next phase of Marvel movies ramping up, it’s hard not to be excited about the next bunch of characters rising to prominence. And while the MCU’s Blade movie is still pretty far off, the previous movies and small hints of what’s to come from this year’s TV shows are making us look forward to this character’s return to the big screen all the more. Plus, Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft has made spookier characters all the more accessible to play in fifth edition. So while we wait for more information and the next few Marvel films, let’s figure out how to sneak Blade into your next D&D session.
Sometimes characters take a little creative sheet design to make workable in a Dungeons and Dragons setting while other characters are almost too perfect for exactly the sort of adventures that game designers had in mind. While most super heroes are comfortably in the first category, Ravenloft and new additions to the D&D sourcebook library make Blade surprisingly straight forward. Dhampir were only available in homebrew for a bit, before making their way to Unearthed Arcana and then finally being officially published, and while the Monster Hunter subclass for Fighter is still the stuff of UA, it’s very playable. Without those we would have to fudge a fair amount of this character or get a little creative, but as it stands a half-vampire vampire-hunter is really not that weird for D&D.
Dhampir covers most of the weird specifics I’d want to fit into the character for roleplaying purposes like his numerous skills and abilities, fangs and bite, ability boosts, and hunger for blood. Of course, it’s Blade, so you’ll probably want to roleplay a narrative around not wanting to actually drink blood.
Fighter and Monster Hunter covered most of the other basics I want this character to have, but I gave him a Weapons Mastery feat just to make sure no weapons were off limits. As of right now, Monster Hunter gives characters limited magic abilities that would help them find and detect monsters, which is pretty much spot on, but we’ll have to keep an eye on this one since it’s not officially published in any source books yet and can evolve.
Blade has a nearly endless arsenal of different weapons and I wanted to represent some of the favorites, but I was sure to give him his sword. His armor seems like kevlar or kevlar-adjacent, so I wanted to chose something with a decent AC boost that wouldn’t give him disadvantage to stealth, which left us a little limited. In the end I borrowed Chain Shirt stats, but if you don’t mind taking a hit to stealth, have another option you like more, or have a DM who is very good at helping you homebrew creative solutions, by all means do that instead.
As far as super hero inspired characters go, Blade is one of the easiest to sneak into your next D&D campaign and one of the hardest for your party members to notice and say, “Wait a minute!” If the setting we normally see him in was different, Blade would be a D&D character, and I think that’s pretty fun.
How would you make Blade for a D&D campaign? Would you like to see us come back around to this character for a second look when the MCU movie comes out and what would you like to see changed? Which TV show, movie, or game would you like to see character sheets from next titme? Let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
