I think it was probably some combination of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my freshman year of college (the show finished its final season in my Junior year of high school) and then getting into World of Warcraft and finding the Undead Scourge to be my favorite villains that really cemented my love of undead monsters.
While the classic first adventure in a D&D campaign tends to involve goblins or kobolds, I've often instead used skeletons and zombies. In my original campaign, it was the second session (that one did actually start with a pair of kobolds - which I realized later was far too few for a party to fight,) and then in my current campaign, the first (official) session had the party fight a bunch of zombies that had come up from the sewers and into an Izzet power station (each of the first five adventures was themed around two different guilds, the first one being Golgari/Izzet). And now, my side-campaign back-up for the Wednesday game I'm in is starting out - by player choice, not mine, in a town called Skeleton Bay, where the harbor's dockworkers are actually a guild of necromancers who use animated skeletons to load and unload freighters.
Today, we got another video from the folks at WotC talking about the undead in the new Monster Manual.
Now, there weren't any explicit previews of new stat blocks - though I think some of those were previewed earlier, like the new Skeleton, Burning Skeleton, and Minotaur Skeleton blocks, the same time we got the Ancient Green Dragon and I believe the new Kuo-Toa.
To an extent, this was a bit of a rehash, though we got some cool new things:
Basically, most of the undead "families" of monsters are getting expanded. At the forefront, they've talked about Vampires.
Vampire Familiars are CR 3 humanoids who are basically the mortal servants of the vampires (like Guillermo in the What We Do In the Shadows TV show, though more of his early-season incarnation). This we did actually get a stat block for. Among other things, they have an attack that can deal a bunch of extra necrotic damage, but will leave the target incapacitated and paralyzed - essentially there to allow the Familiar's master to then feed on the target.
Vampire Spawn remain CR 5, though they'll evidently be getting new abilities. Then, there are Vampire Nightbringers, who are meant to sit somewhere between the Spawn and the Vampire proper. Finally, there are Vampire Umbral Lords, which take the notion of the "variant vampires" such as the more martially-affiliated version and makes it its whole own stat block, higher-CR than the standard vampire.
Revenants also got expanded a bit - we have the standard one, but there's also the Graveyard Revenant, in which the bodies of an entire graveyard form one giant mass of bodies that can attack as a whole. Another very fun idea here is the Haunting Revenant - where as vengeful spirit possesses not a humanoid body (or bodies) but a large structure, like a house. (The art here is very cool - a wooden cottage with a gash of a mouth split open and vengeful flames within).
Death Knights - a favorite of mine - get a lower-CR lieutenant called the Death Knight Aspirant, which might help bridge the gap in terms of Death Knight minions. It's always been a little tough that the standard DK minions who might benefit from its aura, for example, are mostly under-CR 1 things like skeletons and zombies that a party could wipe out with a single fireball (to be fair, you could actually use Wights or even Wraiths). Personally, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of the Skeletal Knights from the Dragonlance adventure, and I wonder if these will look a bit like those guys (who are pretty scary with their weapons that prevent healing).
In the "smarter than a zombie but still a fleshy undead creature" family - your Ghouls and Ghasts - there's a new Ghast Gravecaller, which is a spellcasting Ghast that kind of bridges the gap between these guys and Liches - one possible origin story for a Ghast Gravecaller is that it's someone who botched their transformation into a lich, or possibly someone who is in an intermediary stage before fully becoming a lich. (Jeremy Crawford and Wes Schneider joked that DMs could fake out a party of experienced players who come across an undead spellcaster and fear they've run into a lich at way too low a level - personally, I can't wait to see what the new Lich looks like with the new Monsters of the Multiverse-style format for spellcasters).
Another thing of note, as mentioned in their Dragon video, where the Shadow Dragon is becoming its own stat block (blocks?) rather than a template applied to a normal dragon, the Dracolich also appears that it will be getting its own unique abilities - which I'm 100% here for.
Just another fun thing: Crawling Claws now get a higher-CR swarm version - which is great, because a Crawling Claw is very fun, but it's CR 0, so even at level 1 is barely a challenge.
Early access on D&D Beyond begins I believe on Feb. 4th, with the actual release on the 18th.
With that release, we'll truly have all the pieces for this "5.5E" demi-edition, which is very exciting. I think what's particularly fun about a Monster Manual refresh is just that this book holds all the most classic monsters. In the ten years of 5E, we've seen the designers figure out how to really build more interesting creatures, but your classic building blocks have remained unchanged.
While I don't think we're going to be getting a legendary Death Knight, given the goal here of mostly just updating the existing creatures to play the role they're meant for better (and I realize you've got Lord Soth to draw on if you want a legendary DK) I am very excited about using these new creatures. The higher CR stuff will be great for my ongoing Ravnica campaign (which will probably still be in the dungeon they're just entering now - so we'll probably not yet be at level 18) and I'll be very excited to start some new games with all the spruced-up low-CR monsters.
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