Get Out the Lightbulbs and Let’s Play D&D With Uncle Fester
We’re all about to get a good stretch on the rack because our favorite Addams uncle is joining us on our next adventure.
The new Netflix series, Wednesday, got so much right about the Addams family. Including Wednesday’s (and our) favorite Addams uncle, Fester. And you all know the drill by now. Sometimes when we love a character, we figure out how to add them to our next D&D adventure so they can get in on the fun too. So this week we’re playing D&D with…
Uncle Fester
Uncle Fester is a grade-A weirdo, even by Addams standards. Which is a good thing. Who and what he gives us so much freedom to really have fun with a character sheet that might not be ideal for most games, but gives us the opportunity to dip into some pots we don’t usually go near.
For example, Human Revenant is a perfect race for Fester. He’s human…. sort of. But he’s also very close to being something else and he’s nigh unkillable. The guy plays with explosives and electricity for fun. Human Revenant gives him the ability to get knocked out, go down, and come back later as if nothing happened. Plus it’s an easy and effective way to write off his odd appearance within the narrative of your adventure.
For his class I had to do a little more shopping around. Uncle Fester seems like he would be a solid choice for warlock, but when I looked through the subclass options, nothing really stuck out for him. Warlockery seemed too serious and sometimes in service of their patron. Fester doesn’t serve anything but chaos and whatever will make his family members happy. Which is often also pretty chaotic.
I even considered having him duel class to keep the warlock options open, but in the end, I decided that Uncle Fester needs to be a one-hundred-percent fun sort of character and made him an Arcane Trickster Rogue.
This works on a few levels for me. Gomez is probably at least partially a rogue of some kind with his roguish and swashbuckling tendencies, so it would make sense for the two brothers to be two very different aspects of the common class. Arcane Trickster also lets us lean into Fester as a goofy and fun-loving uncle who’s always willing to goof around with his niece and nephew.
Unlike most roguish archetypes, Arcane Trickster comes with a few spell slots. I mostly spent those on spells that would remind us of Uncle Fester’s relationship with electricity through thunder and lightning, or just otherwise felt fun and maybe a little spooky.
Finally, one of my biggest goals with Fester was to make a character who just gets harder and harder to kill. His Revenant status allows him to come back from the dead (sort of), he has an absurdly high constitution, and I gave him feats that would allow him to have more HP, or walk away from attacks with a lucky reroll.
How would you make Uncle Fester for D&D? Did you enjoy Wednesday? Which version of Uncle Fester throughout the years has been your favorite? let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
