The arrows fell like rain, magic erupted tearing the hordes of undead asunder. They marched forward like ceaseless waves crashing upon the walls of Fort Baratok, pushing against the large wooden doors that strained under the pressure. Rallying cries echoed from within the walls as the defenders braced the doors and attempted to reinforce them. In silence, a figure clad in dense armor plating watched from a hill as his undead soldiers assailed the fort.
The assault continued for hours, hours turned to days, the siege unrelenting. Slowly the defenses crumbled and the defenders were rendered to nothing more than meals for the undead. The figure clad in armor walked into Fort Baratok and looked at the walls of his ancestral home, taken from him after his fall. “My most vile and loathsome Lord Evart, your army was…decimated taking this fort, was it really wise?” a pathetic maggot of a man hobbled to the armor-clad figure, bowing and averting his eyes in reverence.
Lord Evart skeletal hand extanded, slowly closing it into a fist. The dead drew breath and shambled to their feet. A hollow reverberating voice wormed its way out from the armor “This is but the first step, many more of my enemies will find a similar fate.” Glowing red eyes turned to the lowly man that cowered from the rising dead. “They made me what I am, and I will show them the error of their ways.”
The damned had returned for their revenge.
Overview
The Marshall to command your lumbering hordes of undead and army of occultists, and the answer to the question, “Hey, what if a paladin became a Lich”. While they aren’t an exact 1-to-1 comparison to the Lich, the Death Knight is a equally formidable foe to act as your campaign’s big bad evil guy. There are a few things to take note of for the Death Knight.
First, the Death Knight is a divine caster. While they have fallen from grace and betrayed their oath, to the point of them rising as undead, they have retained their ability to cast spells. Their strong offensive physical capabilities are only enhanced by their spells, and can even take control of the battlefield. They have, however, lost the ability to heal. This isn’t entirely surprising as they are undead and the undead usually cannot be magically healed.
Second, they are Immortal until redeemed. This is very powerful for role play purposes and for game play. Your Death Knight can be killed by the party and in the end of a story arc just to come back at the end of another one by killing an ally of the party or (with player buy-in1) a player. Letting the party stomp the death knight while they are in a vulnerable state and then “humbling” the adventurers can be a great story beat.
Third and finally, they command the undead or possibly fiends, or both. Give them hordes of creatures that follow them, allow the players to feel like big damn heroes as they make their way through the Death Knight’s strong hold, striking down untold numbers of monsters. In this instance I would pull a monster mechanic from 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons2 of giving a monster the “Minion” typing. Put simply a “Minion” monster is the same as its normal counterpart that a player may see at an earlier level, but instead has only 1 hit point. This will give your martial characters the feeling of cleaving through hordes like a one-man-war-machine and will let your casters feel like their spells are as powerful as they should be.
Stats
Now with all that being said let’s look at what this beastie can do.
This is another good example of a monster designed to be a boss, let’s explore that.
A very high armor class and a good amount of hit points; though it is on the lower side for CR 17 but this will be supplemented by their Parry reaction, more on this at the end.
Look at those 20s in Strength and Constitution, and an 18 in Charisma. This sets the Death Knight up to be a formidable opponent. That coupled with their saving throws, the Death Knight will be standing up to a lot of abuse from the players.
Magical Resistance! Any time a creature gets advantage on save versus spells and abilities, the players will start to narrow in their focus. Plus its a fun thematic trope for a boss to shrug off the big attacks that scatter the parties lesser enemies.
As said above, the advantage against Turn Undead will keep minion monsters in the fight for longer. Marshall Undead covers a ridiculous area, 60’ from the Death Knight will more than likely cover the entirety of the combat. Not only will this allow monsters to stay, but it will allow you a little moment when the Cleric uses turn/destroy undead to have the Death Knight gloat or taunt the part, with lines like; “You gods will abandon you, as they did me…But you will find solace in my flock.”
While they don’t have access to the Paladin’s Divine Smite ability, they do get Paladin Spellcasting. There are too many options for me to go into without this blog post becoming the length of a short novella, but just know that the Death Knight will be able to figure out with players will be likely to fail Banishment or Command and will use that info.
If you’ve read my Kuo-toa posts you know that I like weapon attacks that deal additional special damage, and boy howdy does the Death Knight deliver. A three attack Multiattack that has a +11 to hit, that is delicious, this will hit more often than not. Then the normal weapon damage plus an additional 4d8 necrotic damage per attack, this is my jam! If you hit three times and get the average damage, you will be chunking the player(s) down 27 hit points per attack, if all three land you will carve out a thick 81 hit points from a player. I don’t care how busted their build is, I don’t care how many hit points they have, if you look at a player and say “all three attacks hit, dealing a total of 81 damage” they will panic.
Do you like Fireball? Well the Death Knight gets their own (once per day) Fireball like ability, that is arguably better than a Fireball. Allow me to explain. Hellfire Orb has the same radius and slightly shorter range of Fireball, the damage wraps around the corners and has the same save for half damage ability. Where it differs is a Fireball cast at 9th level will only be able to put out 14d6 fire damage; while Hellfire Orb will deal 10d6 fire and 10d6 necrotic damage. We love to see abilities that deal multiple types of damage, and that let us roll lots and lots of dice.
Finally the Parry reaction. While this looks good on paper, it lacks a certain luster. Firstly, it does add a large (+6) bonus to the Death Knight’s armor class, this is better than Shield. However, unlike Shield, it only affects the attack that you use the reaction on, and it contains the caveat of only being able to affect melee attacks. Again, Parry looks good on paper but it will only be effective against your tanks and the stabby stabby Rogues3.
Combat Example
Now we are going to create an encounter that will serve as the final encounter of a campaign. In this combat the party has to:
Defeat the Death Knight putting an end to his reign of terror
Interrupt the Death Knight’s ritual
Survive4
Now in this combat we will have a Death Knight, 4 Wights, as many Skeletons/Zombies you want, and many cultists and priests conducting the ritual, the cultists and priests will be focused on the ritual and will only fight in defense if they survive the attack, This combat will be against 5 fifteenth level adventurers. Now the exact details of the ritual I will leave for you to figure out, it’s your campaign after all, you will know what fits best into it. However, one caveat I will include for the Ritual is don’t have it include: the deaths of the cultists/priests increase the speed at which the ritual takes place. Pulling the rug out from your players and saying “Ha! If you kill these people in the COMBAT ENCOUNTER it will be detrimental!”, because that is fun for no one. Now on to the first round.
In the first round, if the Death Knight has rolled high on it’s initiative and the players are clumped together, you will definitely want to hit them with the Hellfire Orb, this will not only scare the players because it cannot be counter seplled (since its not a spell) but it will put them in the mind set of “If we stand too close to each other, then we will get hit with that again”.
Make your players move around the battlefield. Have zombies spring up out of the ground from trap doors or break through the floor as your players run by. The Death Knight is the Marshall of the Undead, if they don’t have hordes of zombies and skeletons or other undead nasties then what are they even doing? Don’t be afraid to throw waves of undead at your high level players the casters will have fun taking out swathes of them with their AoE spells, the clerics will enjoy turning them to dust with Destroy Undead5, and your martails will enjoy running through the hordes untouched as claw, tooth, and fist bounce off their Armor Class.
Now if the Death Knight does not go first, or even is one of the last to act, then this is where being a spellcaster will help. If you have had the lackeys of the Death Knight Scrying on the players, and let’s be honest they should, then it will be easy to pick out which adventurer is going to be susceptible spells like Hold Person and Banishment. These being concentration spells makes them fairly easy to break if the players pump massive amounts of damage into the Death Knight, so don’t worry too much about banishing the Barbarian and them being out of the entire combat; they will come back soon enough and their return, and subsequent attacks of revenge, will be all the sweeter.
Use the wights to make ranged attacks with their longbows towards the squishy characters and downed characters. Players can always be revived mid-fight, and even brought back by divine means. They will inevitably be targeted and killed quickly by the ranged casters or the martials, but this is their purpose, draw fire away from the Death Knight.
Final Thoughts
If you want to run an undead horde campaign with a titanic badass at the helm, who can strike down foes like wheat before the scythe. Then the Death Knight is your monster. An immortal undead foe that will keep coming back until the party permanently entombs them or sends them deep into the far flung reaches of the Astral Sea to be a problem for the future, the Deaht Knight will be a force of unholy nature that will test your players at every turn.
While your games are run and planned by you, D&D is better as collaborative story telling. Let your players be included in shaping the major arcs, bring players in on your schemes, or highlight and follow their schemes.
It may have appeared in other editions or other games, but this is where I know it from.
As opposed to shooty shooty Rogues.
Easy Peasy
Destroy Undead is the 5th level ability all Clerics get, that scales at levels 8, 11, 14, 17