While we are not actually getting the World of Warcraft D&D sourcebook until next month, there have been a few previews, and thanks to the exposure of Dungeon Masters, the WotC-produced actual play show that has been running short campaigns to showcase new products (not unlike the original incarnation of Acquisitions Incorporated, actually,) a few things have been revealed from it.
The most interesting of which is the ability to play as the Undead.
Now, here's a funny thing:
In World of Warcraft, the playable Undead race has been around since the game's launch in 2004. Presented as "Forsaken" in the book (a word that the playable undead apply to themselves as a kind of national identity in WoW, and largely synonymous with their particular breed of sentient and free-willed undead,) this is the first D&D species in all of 5E to have the Undead creature type. The irony, though, is that in World of Warcraft, despite the race being literally called "Undead" and the existence of creature types in a similar manner to how they work in D&D (a slightly different list of types, but the concept is the same) that includes Undead, WoW Undead player characters are actually classified as Humanoid.
Now, both D&D and WoW strive for balance, but given both the ability for developers to constantly tweak WoW with patches and such and also the narrower tolerance for imbalance in a game where you might not be able to get into a raid with a guild if you can't get your DPS numbers high enough, WoW's need for balance between its various players options is certainly greater, and making Undead (the race) count as Humanoid (the creature type) just heads off a ton of problems that could arise.
Now, Death Knights, the first class to be added to the game four years after its initial launch, are also undead, story-wise. While the process of creating a Death Knight versus the way that the Forsaken came to be the way they are is very different, in both cases, the root cause was the Undead Scourge and the Lich King. While Forsaken who rose from death prior to the breaking of their bond to the Lich King began their unlives as shambling zombies, Death Knights were always possessed of their humanoid-level intelligence and capabilities, just essentially magically brainwashed into fighting for the Lich King. Forsaken (and I'll just use this to refer to the race/species in both games to simplify things) can also be Death Knights, which means that you started off as a human, died to the Plague of Undeath, rose again, broke free of the Lich King's control, were then killed and raised yet again by the Lich King, then once again broke free of the Lich King's control (to be fair, given the ongoing timeline of the game, there are cases where Forsaken might have initially risen from death already with free will, and also Death Knights who were raised by Bolvar Fordragon, who was the Lich King but one who more or less acted as a warden for the Scourge, meaning that his Death Knights were always there to protect Azeroth, rather than menace it).
Anyway, like Forsaken, in WoW, Death Knights also count as humanoid. There is an exception: they have an ability called Lichborne that temporarily makes them undead and removes certain debuffs (what we'd call conditions in D&D) as well as making themselves valid targets for the healing of the Death Coil ability. But broadly speaking, they're humanoid, which again, heads off various balance issues.
So, it is interesting to me that in the upcoming D&D book, both the species and the subclass-that's-more-than-a-subclass will count as Undead.
This is interesting for a few reasons:
When they were originally testing the "Gothic Lineages" in Unearthed Arcana prior to the announcement of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, they actually experimented with having Dhampir and Reborn officially count as both humanoid and undead (or possibly humanoid and construct for Reborn). There was "reminder text" that said that spells that normally wouldn't work on undead, like Cure Wounds in 5.0, would work on them because of the humanoid creature type there as well. I put that reminder in quotes because that's not obvious: such spells said they didn't work on creatures of that type, and so you'd assume that if you had that type, even if you had another type, the spell wouldn't work.
But 5.5 kind of fixed that: the vast majority of spells that once excluded Undead and Constructs from their benefits now have no such restrictions. There's nothing stopping you from casting Healing Word on the Battle Smith's Steel Defender or on the Necromancer's Skeleton familiar (though I don't know that it would be the most optimal play). Indeed, our first playable Construct species was in 5.0 with the Autognome, which had a special list of healing spells that would work on them despite being constructs (a list that was not actually comprehensive). But with the 5.5 updates to the spells, the Warforged, released as humanoid in 5.0, were made Constructs in Forge of the Artificer, and as far as I know, there's no real downside to that anymore, as I believe any beneficial spell will work on a Construct.
Despite this fix, Ravenloft: Horrors Within didn't change the creature types of the Dhampir or Reborn. In the former case, though, I'll actually say this was 100% the right call: the very premise of a dhampir is that they're the living offspring of vampires. The whole point of a dhampir is that they're vampire-like, but not undead nor bound to be evil. Dhampir are often vampire hunters, actually, like Blade from the Marvel comics, Alucard from the Castlevania series, or Vampire Hunter D from... Vampire Hunter D. (The D honestly might just stand for Dhampir, which the English dub of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust infuriatingly translates to "Dunpeal" despite the fact that Dhampir is a... well, maybe not English in origin, but it's certainly a European-origin word.)
So, a lot of spells got the restriction on Constructs and Undead removed. Similarly, the Cleric's Turn Undead feature now specifies that it only affects undead creatures you choose - and thus you can (if you choose) avoid screwing over your Forsaken, Death Knight, or Forsaken Death Knight party member.
But!
There are some problems that might arise.
The biggest is resurrection magic:
There are only a few resurrection spells in the game - by my count, and not including weird things like Clone, we've got Revivify, Raise Dead, Reincarnate, Resurrection, and True Resurrection. Let's look at each of these:
Revivify, the quick mid-combat resurrection spell that requires the target be dead for no longer than a minute, has no restrictions. We're gold on this one.
Raise Dead, which gives you a 10-day window and thus can potentially be left unprepared until you need it, however, won't work on a creature that was undead when it died.
This is kind of interesting: what I assume the point of this restriction is is to make spells like Finger of Death or a Death Tyrant's Negative Energy Cone scarier - if an ally dies affected by these, you can't just raise them.
But there's a sort of interesting question this raises: if you Revivify someone who died to a Shadow Dragon's breath and then rose as a Shadow... are you bringing the (probably) humanoid character back to life? Or do you just get the Shadow the party had to put down back to attack you again? Maybe that's a weird case because the Shadow is probably a separate "body" from your friend's corpse. But in a Finger of Death scenario, if your friend gets zombified by it and you revivify them after taking them down as a zombie, is the zombie's corpse a humanoid corpse or an undead corpse? (This is also relevant for Animate Dead - can my necromancer just endlessly recycle the corpses or bone piles I used to make my undead army, or do they lose their juice once I've turned them undead the first time?)
Reincarnate also requires you to target a humanoid who has died. That actually makes a lot of problems for more beyond the undead - you can't use this on a Thri-kreen, Plasmid, Warforged, Changeling, Kalashtar, or Forsaken, each of which (in their latest printing) don't count as humanoid. 5th level spells are not kind to our Forsaken or Death Knight PCs.
Resurrection has the same limitation as Raise Dead - it simply doesn't work on a creature that was undead when it died.
Ok, but here's the insane thing: can we cast this on an undead creature who hasn't died as undead yet? Like, again, if our buddy gets killed with the Lich's Finger of Death spell, can we cast it on the still-active zombie? After all, they weren't undead when they died, and they haven't died again yet, so... does that work?
Finally, True Resurrection. This is the ultimate "you can basically always get a PC back if you have a 17+ level Cleric or Druid" spell, where I think you basically only can't use this if they were killed by a Nightwalker or some such thing. Even if a creature was undead at their death, True Resurrection restores them to their non-undead form.
But that, in and of itself, creates weird issues for our Forsaken and Death Knight characters. If we cast this on a Forsaken character, do they... have to become Human? Changing their species? This is a part of Reincarnate, so it's not like there's no precedence. Honestly, this could be an amazing story moment, especially if you're playing up the Alliance/Horde conflict in your Azeroth adventures, given that the Forsaken are not on great terms with living humans given that their primary experience with the latter is, like, the Scarlet Crusade (mad religious zealots convinced that anyone outside their ranks is tainted by the Undead Scourge and must be eradicated). But this could even be a character's quest - seeking to be freed from the curse of undeath if they should find a cleric powerful enough to restore them.
For a Death Knight, though... I mean, species traits aren't nothing, but again, there's precedence for a spell - specifically a resurrection spell - changing that, even randomizing it. But what do you even do with a Death Knight that has been restored to true life via True Resurrection? Do they... do they just become a more conventional Paladin?
Ok: big grain of salt time:
We don't actually have the book in hand (I think some YouTubers do as part of the promotion for the book, but I sure as hell don't have it,) so there's every possibility that the book addresses all of this. It might be as simple as saying that in both these cases, these spells work fine on Forsaken and Death Knight characters, as a special carve-out.
What might be a little more fun, though, would be if they make certain Necromancy spells duplicate that function. Let's say that Animate Dead gets an alternate use, similar to how the Plant Growth spell has two modes. In this case, maybe Animate Dead effectively works like Raise Dead for undead PCs. You get a nice benefit: that it's a more forgiving window of time compared to Revivify and it doesn't have a consumed spell component, but the downside is that you need someone who can cast the spell. Now, Clerics actually simply have Animate Dead on their spell list (something I think I've literally never seen a Cleric cast, though to be fair, I don't know I've actually seen Animate Dead in action before at all). But it also means that, say, a Wizard might be the one to bring your Death Knight back.
Certainly, I think that unless you have a blanket ban on resurrection magic to up the stakes of your campaign (something I think both the current and previous campaigns of Critical Role have done) in which case this distinction isn't really a problem, you shouldn't penalize players for picking this species and/or subclass.
See, I think resurrection magic in D&D is a pressure valve. Stakes are great to have, and the danger of losing a PC can make for a more exciting game.
But as I think many years of watching shows and reading books in which characters get killed off left and right has taught me: sometimes it's less interesting for a character to simply get killed off than for them to continue onward in the face of peril. (I gave up reading the Saga comic series when a character who should have been completely immune to the danger of being killed off was, somehow, killed off for basically no reason and with no real impact on the story.) Yes, death is a fail state in D&D, and games need fail states, but there's a reason why in video games you get to reset to the last place you saved. You're not ready for that story to be over.
Again, the WoW D&D book sounds like it's going to be doing much bolder experimentation with what you can do with the 5E framework - something I wish that non-Universes Beyond books would try more. Perhaps if it's a success, we might see such experimentation in core D&D products. I'd be very much down for that as a direction - after twelve years of 5E, I think we can stand to get a bit more radical with design.
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