In the 2025 Monster Manual, the idea of "variant" monsters, which in 2014 were shown through green boxes with various tweaks you could make to a monster, was set aside in favor of just giving us full stat blocks. This was also done with the Dracolich and Shadow Dragon templates, which were overlayed, essentially on existing dragons.
Vampires are, of course, the quintessential gothic horror monster. While there are higher-CR undead creatures, like the Lich or the Death Knight (and I was so happy that they made the Death Knight legendary in 2025,) the Vampire does hold a certain mystique to it. Of course, Count Dracula is arguably the most iconic horror villain of all time, and I think there's something about how a vampire's thirst for blood has, at least since Stoker's novel, become a metaphor or analogy for sexual urges and the discomfort we feel around them. In fact, I was wrong in the previous sentence, because Stoker's novel was itself a bit of a response to the decades-older novel Carmilla, in which a female vampire preys on a young woman, with heavy implications of a homosexual undertone to the whole affair. (Viewers of the Castlevania anime from a few years back might recognize her as the vampire who rivals Dracula's power. Also, Varney is from an even older serialized story from the mid 19th century).
In D&D, Strahd von Zarovich is canonically the original vampire within its multiverse, transformed into the undead abomination by the Dark Powers and becoming the first of Darklord of the Domains of Dread.
Vampires are hard to kill: historically, there were various folk beliefs on how one must deal with them - sometimes burying them face-down so that if they tried to claw out of their graves they'd only dig themselves deeper, or beheading them and placing their head between their legs, or plunging an iron or wooden stake within their heart. Real peoples' remains have had these treatments, often when the body (for whatever reason) failed to decompose quickly enough and elicit fears that they weren't truly dead.
In our modern era, nerds tend to come up with some strict pop-culture rules about monsters that were generally looser when people (or I should say when a large proportion of people) actually believed these things existed. Generally, there are two really pervasive ideas about how a vampire can be killed: exposure to sunlight and a wooden stake to the heart. Sometimes fire or beheading are also included (I watched through the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer during my freshman year of college, right after the show had ended, and for the most part, I think of "The Buffy Rules" as the most broadly agreed-upon rules about vampires, perhaps with the exception of their faces changing when their fangs came out - that was a stipulation by the network to make it clear that the things this teenage heroine was killing were not just people).
The 2025 Monster Manual gives us a veritable feast of vampire monsters to choose from. While the 2014 one gave us the Vampire Spawn (a lower-level vampire that could be a threat to a tier 1 party, but will start to be the sort of monster you fight in droves as you get into higher tier 2) and the Vampire, a CR 13 legendary monster, meant to represent a true and genuine threat, and a reasonable tier 2 endboss.
We did get a Vampire Warrior and Vampire Spellcaster variant for this, which bumped it up to a CR 15, though it was mostly just some tweaks.
2025 gave us some interesting new options:
The Vampire Familiar isn't actually a vampire, at least not yet. They're a humanoid servant of the vampire, playing a character like Renfield (though not actually the way Renfield is in the book itself, where he's really just a mentally disturbed victim rather than any sort of actual help to Dracula) or actually like the familiars in What We Do in the Shadows (to take a far sillier example) like Guillermo (on the TV version of it).
Now, both the Vampire Spawn and Vampire can work quite well as your standard "hot vampire." The Vampire Nightbringer, new to 2025, is quite different.
Notably, while vampires in most media look pretty much like humans, except perhaps they are paler (due to their inability to go into the sun) and have those nice sharp canines, occasionally they are depicted as far less human. Count Orlok, in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu - which was literally an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula with all the names changed to avoid a lawsuit (and some changed plot details,) showed its central vampire as this hunched, hairless, truly inhuman creature (also, he had fanged incisors rather than canines).
This style of vampire does show up in vampire fiction sometimes, and sometimes also incorporates bestial features like big, bald wings. In Francis Ford Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire has many different forms, including one that is extremely bat-like (true to the novel, he's also able to go out in the day, his powers somewhat diminished, but in this case he just looks like Gary Oldman when he was in his mid-30s, in period costume). Still, though, we have other examples to look at: Again, looking to Buffy, the lore in that show is that the first human vampires were created by vampiric demons called Turok-Han, and the most ancient vampires, like the first season's big bad, The Master, start to look more like them over time. Also, the being mistaken for an angel in Midnight Mass is a pale-skinned, hairless winged figure who is, despite the misapprehension by Father Paul, is most certainly a vampire.
Nightbringers are vampires in this mode. They are tougher than Vampire Spawn, but not legendary creatures and at a lower CR than the legendary versions. As a note, these can fly, and they are also bound only by some of the standard vampire weaknesses: they are not harmed by running water and they do not require an invitation to enter a home.
I will also note that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft gave us creatures literally called Nosferatu. These are nearly the same CR as Nightbringers, but mechanically quite different. But flavor-wise, they are the gaunt, hairless, less-human-looking vampires.
The classic vampire is CR 13, and still operates with a mechanical theme that the old version did - there were some adjustments (they lost their health regeneration and just got more HP to compensate, and then they just do more damage) but the overall idea of them is pretty similar: they can easily charm foes to do their bidding and they are very slippery. They also have a quick way to survive any encounter in which they're reduced to 0 HP, in most cases forcing its foes to track it to its resting place and kill it there. (There are some fiddly rules questions about how this actually works - like if it shouldn't even be able to move if it's at 0 HP while in Mist form, but this is a very "rules as intended" reading required).
But now we come to the Vampire Umbral Lord.
Here's kind of where I wanted the crux of the post to focus on (just got carried away with my preamble): The Vampire proper is clearly built to fill the standard Gothic Horror monster role: the slipperiness and the ability to charm are meant to make hunting it very tricky. Interestingly, the bite attack can be a threat to players if it deals the downing blow, but given that it deals only 19 damage on average, I actually think it makes far more sense for the vampire to threaten friendly NPCs.
In other words: if we are to recreate Dracula as a story in D&D, Dracula is our vampire, the party is Seward, Quincy, Arthur, and maybe Jonathan, while the goal is to defeat the vampire before Lucy and then Mina are turned. (Van Helsing is probably our powerful NPC ally).
Don't get me wrong: a Vampire can potentially be a tough fight, largely because of their bonus action charm ability, and their actual attacks have become more powerful with the new version.
What role, then, is the Umbral Lord meant to play?
My sense is that the Umbral Lord is the "spellcaster variant" vampire spun out into its own full stat block. Because of this, it actually shares very few abilities or features of the standard vampire. For one, their escape mechanic is far harder to counter: as long as they aren't in sunlight or running water, they simply teleport to their resting place - meaning you can't track or entrap them in Mist form (in fact, they don't have any shapeshifting ability). Umbral Lords don't even actually need to get close to a creature to drain them, having a bonus action drain with a 30-foot range (which I'd flavor like them calling the blood out of a person's body in a stream toward them).
Between this and having the Hunger of Hadar spell as a recharge ability, in a lot of ways, I see the Umbral Lord as stepping a bit out of the Gothic Horror genre and into dark fantasy. The standard Vampire wants to possess and/or drain their victims, and may even, like Dracula, have this agenda of spreading vampirism to create a kind of empire.
The Umbral Lord is the one who wants to blot out the sun and fully transform the world into one of darkness. (World of Darkness?)
A few things come to mind: one is that I imagine a Vampire Umbral Lord to be more likely to be kind of ideological in their ethos and also their methods. Sure, your classic vampires could have some sort of cult of familiars, but these I think would be more likely to be servants (familiars among them). An Umbral Lord, in my mind, is someone preaching apocalyptic visions. I think these could easily have some of your expanded cultist options, especially Death Cultists, working for them.
Likewise, I can see an Umbral Lord being more enmeshed with broader fantasy villains - they might count Liches among their allies (they might even be the lieutenant of a lich) and I could very much see them working alongside fiends of various stripes.
Indeed, the fact that Umbral Lords have access to Hunger of Hadar makes me feel like they could also be in league with Aberrations.
The art of the Umbral Lord shows a bald, female-presenting vampire in ostentatious clothes. I don't necessarily read that baldness as aligning her with the Nosferatu-aesthetic vampire (she does have eyebrows and lashes, for one thing). But I think you could very easily distinguish Umbral Lords in that way if you wished.
Again, it's perfectly reasonable to just run an Umbral Lord as a vampire who happens to also know some magic (indeed, Strahd is a powerful spellcaster at least in lore).
But to me, I sort of see the vampires in the Monster Manual as representing two "tracks" of vampirism.
The Vampire Spawn and classic Vampire are your staple Gothic Horror monsters, whose threats are terrifying and deadly, but limited in scope.
The Nightbringers and Umbral Lords, though, I see as the kind of vampires that can bring down nations and entire worlds, and whose ambitions are far grander than just getting some more victims to drain.
I re-wrote an adventure I had created for my original campaign earlier this year, and I decided that the distinction for Vampire Nightbringers was that these creatures originated in the Shadowfell, and perhaps aren't actually former mortals, but just born monsters (which helps justify their less pervasive vampire weaknesses).
Umbral Lords could be similar - being of a more ancient, quasi-demonic nature. Unlike Nightbringers, though, Umbral Lords do have the full swath of vampiric weaknesses, which suggests to me that the intent is simply for them to be vampires who have developed these magical powers.
Still, ironically, while the Umbral Lord is a higher-CR monster, I actually think the more natural use for them is to make them less of a horror-threat than a dark-fantasy villain. A classic vampire is going to stalk innocent people without a history of monster-hunting, while an Umbral Lord expects to go up against the world's champions. They might be a particularly cunning and deadly threat, but the genre implied by them is slightly less straight-horror in tone.
That being said, it's not that you can't use an Umbral Lord in a true horror-themed campaign. But I think that you're going to bleed a bit out of the standard gothic horror tropes. That aforementioned adventure does center around an Umbral Lord (when initially written he was going to be a Vampire Spellcaster with a second phase that became a huge homebrewed aberration as he transformed into a "blood god"). In this case, the villain is a millennia-old vampire (who predates even the technologically-advanced civilization that fell three thousands years prior to the campaign) who has been using a brainwashed decoy who is acting like a classic Dracula-like vampire (and is, in fact, just a mortal human) to throw people off his scent and ensnare those who would hunt him. This character, Baron Orszag (Orszag is just the Hungarian word for "Land," as in Magyarország, the Hungarian name for Hungary, which just means "Land of the Magyars," but it sounded cool and in tribute to both Bela Lugosi and my dad's country of origin, it felt right to use a lot of Hungarian words in this adventure) is in league with the campaign's big bad, the leader of a cult trying to use the power of the Far Realm to ascend to godhood.
Thus, while the adventure begins with pretty strict gothic horror tropes and vibes, gradually, the setting's cosmic horror and more advanced technology starts to play a bigger and bigger role.
The only shame of it is that in this entire vampire adventure, I don't actually use the standard Vampire stat block.
Again, I think that the Vampire proper is built for a horror tale. But that's always tough in D&D, because every player character is built to fight monsters. Horror as a genre is almost always about the heroes/victims recognizing that they're seriously outclassed by their foe, and they're forced to adapt and grow in order to stand a chance at surviving.
Now, you can have badass characters in a horror movie: Predator, for example, starts off in classic Schwarzenegger mode, with nigh-invincible soldiers outclassing the enemy soldiers/fighters they encounter. But the movie takes these classic 80s badasses (in an era when action heroes were sort of invulnerable) and then had something far, far deadlier start hunting them, suddenly dropping these tough warriors into the same role as the largely helpless teenagers hunted by Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Kreuger.
Again, I think that a really strong way you could up the horror of a vampire in a D&D game is simply by making the players not the vampire's actual targets: again, if the players are the Van Helsings, tasked with protecting the Lucys and Minas (though perhaps with less 19th Century gender dynamics,) you can make it a lot scarier, because even though the Aasimar Barbarian is not too frightened of an attack that's dealing 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic damage, just one of those is going to potentially spell doom for the person they're protecting.
Curse of Strahd, notably, has an NPC who needs protection from him: Irena Kolyana, the object of Strahd's obsession, is a Noble with 14 hit points. Now that 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic is looking a hell of a lot deadlier.
But, if you wanted to go the Predator route - to have a monster that truly outclasses the badass adventurers that are your party, when do you first unleash a vampire on them?
A vampire outside of its lair is worth 10,000 xp (naturally we'd want to save the lair for a later, perhaps final encounter). If we assume 5 players, when can we have a high-difficulty encounter with that budget for them? That's 2000 xp per player, which should be a tough fight at level 8 (at which point the high-xp budget per player is 2,100).
But...
Look, I think that that's probably going to be a hard encounter. It might genuinely be quite tough. But I think even with the high-difficulty balance, it's going to be "a tough encounter" and not "a harrowing brush with death." Level 8, after all, is just two levels below the level where you fight Strahd, and while that's also meant to be tough, he's got various additional protections that make his fight last longer.
What I'm looking for, basically, is a level at which a Vampire can drop a party member in just a single round of attacks. We might hold off on actually biting them - while we want it to be scary, we don't necessarily want to perma-kill a PC (though check with your table and see if they're ok with that in a horror-themed game,) so we'll be talking mainly its two Grave Strike attacks. If we want to maximize damage while lessening the likelihood that our PC is slain and rises as a vampire spawn, we can actually do the full multiattack but weave the bite in between the two grave strikes.
Grave Strikes deal 1d8+4 bludgeoning and 2d6 Necrotic damage, and grapple the target. So, that's an average of 15 damage per hit. Two of those do 30. The bite is a Con save, with a save for none, and deals 1d4+4 piercing and 3d8 necrotic, or an average of 19.
If we assume +2s to Con with most characters (+3 is also quite doable,) and average HP on level up, then a d6 character has 8, 14, 20, 26, and then 32 HP at levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. A d8 character has 10, 17, 24, 31, and then 38. A d10 character has 12, 20, 28, 36, and then 44. And a Barbarian (who is more likely to skew toward +3 Con, but we'll stick with this) will have 14, 23, 32, 41, and then 50 by level 5.
Now, of course, the average damage the vampire actually deals is going to be lower, because while they have a quite-healthy +9 to hit and the save versus the bite is 17, even low-level characters might avoid this damage.
Still, I'd probably say level 3 is the lowest the party should be before you pull this on them. If you want to really guard against vamping a PC right at the start, use the bonus action charm person to get the bite off before you do the grave strikes - a willing creature can be a target of their bite. So, bite the 3rd level Sorcerer, and there's at least a chance they'll survive.
Truthfully, though, I think a first encounter with a vampire seems like a reasonable cliffhanger upon which you can get the party up to tier 2 - surviving against one of these monsters would be enough to get them to up their game, and that 4 to 5 jump is a pretty huge one in terms of player power.
I do think you could scare a party that's level 5 or even 6 with a vampire encounter, but I think a tier 1 encounter is the last point at which it will just seem truly impossible for the party to defeat them.
And this first encounter should have something that gets them out of it - have it happen shortly before dawn, so the vampire needs to flee, or perhaps some knowledgable NPC will break a dam or otherwise send flowing water to, again, force the vampire away. Maybe there's some other in-story reason for them to not just kill the party.
Probably the best option here is for this to occur during a seemingly safe downtime period - the party is in a safe town, maybe feeling free to go off on their own to shop for equipment or errands or just RP-ing going off to drink or otherwise unwind.
For a target, the key thing, I think, is to go for someone who will be charmed. Clerics, Druids, Paladins, Warlocks, and Wizards have Wisdom saving throw proficiencies, and of course Rangers and Monks likely have a high Wisdom as well, so targeting an Artificer, Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Rogue, or Sorcerer is your best bet if you want them to fail the save against Charm Person. (Remember also that Elves, Goblinoids, as well as Gnomes and Satyrs are going to have advantage on their save versus the effect).
This is an opportunity for you to send a message to the players: to announce a new villain. I honestly think that the ideal is that the vampire drops the target without turning them into a vampire (make sure the Bite comes early in their attacks) and then, either the party finds them, or better yet, a Commoner NPC does. Commoners now get a single skill proficiency, so you can make that Medicine - just a good Samaritan comes across the character as they're bleeding out, who can stabilize them (maybe they have a reason to be carrying around a Healer's Kit to ensure that they make the check, or you could just fudge it). (And that Commoner can now be an NPC ally who needs to be protected.)
Horror works really well with a slow build - the big reveal of the monster can be momentarily terrifying, but it's also something of a release. You no longer have to check every shadow when the monster is already plainly in view.
You can also describe the charm spell as a kind of intoxicating effect - maybe the PC doesn't even get a good look at the vampire before they're attacked.
Again, as powerful as a standard vampire is, I just don't see an Umbral Lord stalking the streets for their next meal, so I'd really play them more as the leader of some dark organization with far-reaching plots. In this case, having them show up as a hostile NPC early on could work (or even pretending to be a not-so-hostile NPC) but we're probably not doing the "the Fighter is bleeding out in an alley" first meeting with them.
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