Revenants are interesting, because they're I think they're only joined by ghosts in the Monster Manual as undead that aren't inherently (or at least typically) evil. A Revenant is kind of an invitation to be something more of an NPC, though they can still easily be antagonistic toward the party. The point is, they're a spirit seeking vengeance for what they at least consider a great injustice.
The 2014 Monster Manual gave us the base Revenant, while this one gives us two new versions: the Graveyard Revenant and the Haunting Revenant.
The latter of these, the Haunting Revenant, is one that I looked at pretty extensively before the book was out. It's a haunted house as a monster that can trap people in them.
So, while this is probably my favorite version, I've already covered it, so we're going to look at the latter two.
The baseline Revenant is the simplest, first possessing its own body, the Revenant pursues its mission of vengeance unceasingly. If that body is destroyed, though, the Revenant can possess any other humanoid corpse, and over time, that corpse will shift to start looking more like the spirit's body.
The Revenant has a few things that make it pretty scary: it regenerates HP, and of course, can only be permanently destroyed if you cast Dispel Even and Good on its corpse, or if its need for vengeance is satisfied.
The Revenant gets a once-a-day bonus action to curse a target with its Vow of Revenge, which allows the revenant to know the direction and distance to the target - even if it's on another plane of existence. Then, aside from its normal slam attacks, it can glare at a creature to frighten them, and if it's the creature cursed by them, if they fail their save, they're both frightened and paralyzed.
The Revenant also regenerates HP, and is only destroyed if it can't regenerate at 0 HP (which Fire and Radiant damage can prevent).
Now, before we get into how we'd want to use such a creature, let's look at the Graveyard Revenant.
The premise of a Graveyard Revenant (CR 7) is that many spirits, possibly killed en masse in some atrocity, possess all the bodies in a graveyard and merge into one towering, horrifying mass of bodies.
The Graveyard Revenant has attacks that will grapple its targets, but the scarier part is that their grapple also causes the target to be suffocating.
As a note, the rules of suffocating have changed a bit - normally you can hold your breath for a number of minutes equal to one plus your constitution modifier, as before. But when that ends - or if a monster such as this immediately sends you into suffocation - you gain one level of exhaustion at the start of each of your turns. These levels of exhaustion all go away when you are no longer suffocation, thankfully.
And, again, exhaustion is also different: it's now a cumulative -2 penalty to all d20 tests and your speed is reduced by 5 feet per exhaustion level. At 6 levels, you still die.
In other words, this can be a bit of a death spiral. It'll be harder to kill a monster suffocating you the longer they continue to do so.
The Graveyard Revenant also has a recharge ability that is quite nasty: a 30-foot emanation that, on a failed DC 15 Wisdom save, paralyzes every creature for up to a minute (they can repeat the save at the end of their turns).
So, not only is this a pretty horrific sight - a Huge sized towering amalgam of corpses that, despite the fact that you'd think it'd be unwieldy and awkward, actually has a 40-foot movement speed - but what it does is also quite nasty, paralyzing and suffocating.
How, then, do we use a Revenant in our campaigns?
A Revenant's quest for revenge is one that inherently implies some kind of backstory. These are not likely to be the soldiers of some undead legion raised by a necromancer. Instead, it's likely that these figures are solitary. In terms of encounter design, I think you're thus meant to generally use them as solo monsters - vengeance is often a solitary business. That said, a Revenant (particularly the humanoid-shaped type) could potentially hire mercenaries to aid them in their quest, or gather monsters to help them.
Now, again, they're not inherently evil either - it's possible that the revenge they seek really is a matter of justice. That said, justice and revenge are not always aligned: someone seeking revenge might cause more harm than the original crime in pursuit of their goals.
And someone seeking vengeance might be trying to avenge a death that they earned - a murderous bandit or corrupt noble who was taken down by heroic adventurers might wish to even the score. You could even have a Revenant arise from some early villain at the start of a campaign.
However, another option is to make it a mystery: notably, this is one of those monsters that you can easily have your party kill multiple times without needing to worry about a character no longer being available to you. Perhaps its first appearance is unexplained, going after a friendly NPC the party has met. The brazen attack - whether it's successful or not - leads the party to start investigating the mystery of why this undead creature attacked them. (It could also be going after one of the party members.) Vengeance is not always fair or logical, so even the intended victim of this attack might not know exactly what is going on. As the party investigates, they might have more encounters with the Revenant, but all the while they might peel back the layers of the story, discovering who the Revenant is and why they are so animated with a thirst for revenge.
Indeed, the plot they uncover might lead them to feel that the Revenant is actually in the right - maybe the party eventually winds up teaming up with them. It could be that both sides need to learn more about the truth to actually find justice - the Revenant could be going after the wrong person, and the party might not realize that the seemingly-benevolent Archpriest or the friendly local magistrate who gave them a lot of their early quests is actually a Cultist Hieromancer.
Now, I think you could re-skin Revenants to use as generic undead, though at least for the baseline one, this feels kind of redundant - you already have Wights and Wraiths and Ghast Gravecallers. The Graveyard Revenant certainly could stand in for a terrible undead abomination created by necromancers.
The Haunting Revenant, I will say, could easily be the kind of monster where it isn't even clear there's anything to fight yet. I think you could have an entire adventure in which at least some of the party is mysteriously drawn into a spooky house, and it'll be a big reveal when they discover that the house itself is a monster to fight. (Though abilities like Detect Evil and Good and Divine Sense could spoil that reveal). I think you could easily also just kind of fudge the way that the mechanics work to treat the Haunting Revenant less as a combat encounter and more of an exploration one, with the house being a full dungeon to explore (perhaps even with monsters inside to fight).
I love a big undead army, and maybe to a lesser extent I can get behind a mindless zombie horde. But I think Revenants are among the undead monsters who most demand to have a rich and interesting backstory - to be not just some random encounter but a true plot arc, even if it's something of a side-quest to your campaign's main storyline.
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