You can now run an Oops! All Vampires campaign with the increased tiers of Undead added to the D&D 2024 Monster Manual

"Everyone likes undead," as they say at Wizards of the Coast, designers of the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual. But why do we like undead? What's compelling about a mob of zombies, a clatter of skeletons, a brood of vampires, or a lurch of liches?

Because you, as a player, know instinctively that these are enemies and they must be vanquished. None of these namby pamby morally gray areas to get in the way of you and your experience points.

I say that knowing full well there's a lot of gray area in D&D—having completed Curse of Strahd taught me that much. (And if you want to flip the Alignment discussion upside down, then add Descent Into Avernus to your playlist as well.)

But there can be a welcome clarity to facing undead. Not only is it clear that that thing is chaotic and/or evil, there's the added horror of potentially becoming one yourself. "That's part of the deliciousness of gothic horror. There's always a psychological element to it," says designer Jeremy Crawford.

Being those designers, the aforementioned Jeremy Crawford, along with his monstrous partner in crime, F. Wesley Schneider, are here to make things harder on your players. Here are some of their favorite new creatures added to the Monster Manual:

• New types of vampires (more vampires at more Challenge Ratings)
  • Vampire Familiar – A lower CR than Vampire Spawn; still living, but on track to become a Vampire
  • Vampire Spawn
  • Vampire Nightbringer – Between Vampire Spawn and full-fledged Vampire
  • Vampire
  • Vampire Umbral Lord – Beyond the full-fledged Vampire

These multiple tiers of vampires now do for vampires what increasing age does for dragons. It also makes it so you don't have to wait until X level to tell your vampire story. You can even run an Oops! All Vampires campaign top to bottom, if you want to.

Also:

• New Skeleton: [no further info]
• New Ghast: the Ghast Gravecaller – A bridge between Ghasts and Liches (or rather, a botched attempt at becoming a Lich)
• New Crawling Claw: the Swarm of Crawling Claws
• New Death Knight: the Death Knight Aspirant – Now you don't have to wait until such a high level to use one of D&D's most classic monsters
• New Revenants:
  • Graveyard Revenant – Not just one vengeful spirit, this is an entire graveyard of vengeful spirits
  • Haunting Revenant – When a vengeful spirit aims for, say, a human but instead hits an object...like a house

They love the art for the Haunting Revenant so much. In fact, when it was looking like they were going to have to cut it out because there was no room left in the book, the writing and editing teams bent over backwards to make the space in order to keep it. 

Some monsters aren't new, per se, but have had their functionality enhanced:

• Dracolich: No longer a template to overlay on top of another dragon, now the Dracolich has distinctive abilities
• Ghost: Jeremy Crawford's Ghost hit the Acquisitions Inc. players so hard that the players were like, Wait what just happened?!

With the D&D 2024 Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast wants to make monsters scary once more for your players. Sometimes that because the numbers went up. But other times that's because the behaviors have changed to make them more scary. 

The new Monster Manual comes out February 18, 2025. Read our review of the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook here, or the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide here.