Legendary Death Knight in the New Monster Manual

 This is, I suppose, a bit of a small thing, but I thought it was worth talking about:

In the 2014 Monster Manual, there is a stat block for the Death Knight. It's CR 17 - fairly serious even for high-level parties, though not quite in that "tier 4 endgame boss" level (which I think of as generally being CR 20+). Still, it's an iconic monster.

Death Knights might be referred to by different terms in different media, but I think we could make solid arguments that, among the iconic Death Knights in fantasy fiction, we can count the Ring Wraiths from Lord of the Rings, as well as arguably the most iconic cinematic villain of them all, Darth Vader.

The Ring Wraiths, I'd bet, really inspired the idea of a Death Knight in the first place. Their whole deal is that they were a group of humans who were granted Rings of Power by Sauron, which granted them unending life. In Tolkien's very Catholic-informed world, death is actually a gift from god given to humanity (and actually marking them as His favored creation over the Elves). I assume this is because death allows humanity to ascend beyond the living world to something akin to heaven, and evil forces like Sauron encourage humans to fear death in order to motivate them to fall to evil in an effort to forestall it. The Ring Wraiths, thus, are allowed to persist in the world of the living far longer than they're actually supposed to, which slowly allows their bodies to wither away into nothing while their spirits linger, bound to the rings. Which, you know, sounds pretty solidly like being undead, and are generally portrayed as invisible spirits bound in dark armor.

Now, Darth Vader isn't technically undead, but in a science-fantasy sort of way he kind of is - his body preserved by extensive cybernetics, and his actual flesh a scarred, burned mess. It might be a bit ablest to suggest that someone who relies on such medical intervention isn't truly alive, to be clear, but thematically, Vader is someone who loses touch with his humanity around the same time he suffers the terrible injuries that require him to live this way. And let's not ignore that the iconic mask he wears as part of his helmet looks like a skull. On top of this, Vader was once a Jedi, which is essentially the Star Wars equivalent of a Paladin - a knight imbued with mystical powers who is sworn to pursue justice, protect the innocent, and essentially be a hero. Vader betrays this mission in pursuit of power and personal desires (I'm not going to sit here and defend the prequel trilogy, but the overall notion that he was a fallen hero is what's relevant here) and is, you know, an oathbreaker, much as D&D Death Knights are.

So, given how these figures, not to mention D&D's own Lord Soth and also figures from other fantasy franchises like Arthas from the Warcraft series are all basically important, compelling villains...

Why the hell is the 2014 version of the Death Knight not a legendary creature?

The Death Knight is perhaps only second to the Lich in terms of "undead big bads." Sure, Death Knights are often working in service of Liches (while I'm no more inclined to defend the Rise of Skywalker, it's notable that the returned Emperor Palpatine really goes full Lich in that movie... god, what a disappointment that was) but they're not just henchmen. I guess you could argue that the other eight Ring Wraiths might be just really tough creatures, but surely the Witch-King of Angmar would be legendary, right? I mean, he breaks Gandalf's staff.

In 5th edition, Legendary Monsters don't technically have a strict definition, but usually they come with the following two features: Legendary Resistance and Legendary Actions. Both of these have some gameplay issues, to be sure (I like MCDM's version of legendary resistance that imposes a penalty on the creature when they use it) but both serve to make fighting one of these creatures feel like a climactic moment and a tougher fight.

So, while technically I don't have access to the new Monster Manual until Tuesday (when Master-tier D&D Beyond subscribers can get the digital version) I do know someone whose job allowed him to get a peek at the new book a little early, and the first thing they told me was that the Death Knight has been made legendary.

Now, I assume they'll still be CR 17, as before. Again, that's not a terrible challenge for a high-level party, but especially with some tough minions, it could be a challenging fight. And it does look like Death Knights will be getting some tougher minions in the form of Death Knight Aspirants. I don't actually have their stats, but I'm given to understand they're somewhere around 6 to 8 - possibly of a similar CR and design of the Skeletal Knights from the Dragonlance adventure book (a stat block I love using for tougher undead minions - they're extra scary because their attacks prevent healing).

Now, they have recalibrated the XP value of certain challenge ratings, especially at high CR, so I don't know if what we have is accurate. But using the old value for a CR 17 monster, it should be worth 18,000 xp. If we assume a group of 5 player characters, a solo encounter with a Death Knight would match a per-player budget of 3600. That would be a north-of-high difficulty encounter for 10th level characters, a just-south-of-moderate encounter for 12th level characters, and is a little north of low difficulty for 15th level characters. (And of course between these for levels in between).

Thus, I can imagine a few scenarios:

First off, a Death Knight would make a fine final boss fight for a tier 2 adventure. It would probably be genuinely scary, likely doing very high damage for a group where most characters have fewer than 100 hit points.

At tier 2, characters are meant to be fairly seasoned adventurers, "heroes of the realm," who might be the best that the local society has to face domestic threats. A death knight could easily be some figure of the realm/kingdom/country's past, perhaps long-thought-dealt-with, who returns to enact bloody vengeance. In a large campaign, they could of course be a servant of some greater evil, but it might not be until the party actually confronts this death knight that they even realize there is a greater force at play.

The tier 2 Death Knight might be less of a commander of undead legions and more of a powerful, implacable agent of chaos. I think the best way to introduce one would be to have the party come across a fortress or town that has been utterly devastated by the death knight. If they find a survivor, asking what army attacked here, you could have the shaken, shivering wretch swear, against all seeming evidence, that it was all the work of a single person - a single warrior clad in black armor, butchering any who stood in their way.

At higher levels, as the Death Knight's individual power becomes less overwhelming to a group of powerful adventurers - tier 3 parties now being heroes of the entire world, after all - the Death Knight can become more of a battlefield general. Here, you might start to push them more into a supporting role (not unlike the Ring Wraiths, or even Darth Vader for that matter). To keep encounters with them dangerous, now you load them up with minions.

Now, as cool as it is to give a Death Knight a hundred skeletons or zombies to fight by their side, the truth is that D&D encounter design doesn't really favor having massive numbers of creatures on the board. There are rules for attacking as mobs, but I've never loved them, and I also think that AoE spells and abilities like Fireball and Smite Undead, or even just crowd control like Hypnotic Pattern, can make that aspect of your fight's challenge just kind of a "did your caster keep a 3rd level spell slot available" check, which by tier 3 is usually a yes.

Instead, I'd recommend keeping your Death Knight's minions fairly elite themselves - in the CR 5-9 range. These will not necessarily be terrible challenges on their own, and can still fall prey to crowd control spells, but they should (I think) be harder things to deal with, and will draw fire from the Death Knight to keep them in the fight longer.

By tier 4, I'll admit that you're going to probably struggle to keep a CR 17 legendary monster all that challenging. And one downside to making Death Knights legendary is that it makes it harder to use multiple Death Knights in a single fight. By these levels, a Death Knight might just not be a real major villain to a party, who have probably graduated up to demon lords and the like (and frankly, even those stat blocks as they are won't last very long in a solo-monster fight).

This is part of the reason I'm eager to pore over the various Titan creatures. At level 17, a Death Knight will only make up half the budget for a moderate encounter for 5 players.

Still, again, thematically I think a Death Knight feels like something of a threshold villain - you know you've graduated to a higher level of heroism when you are face to face with some terrible villain thought long gone.