Freddy Krueger

This classic monster from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies has long razors on his hands and comes to people in their sleep and kills them. So if you want to avoid him, you had better stay awake.

When looking at this in D&D, we’re definitely looking at a spellcaster who can do a few things, we’re looking a psychic damage or necrotic damage, I’d say, and we’re looking for the ability to walk between planes of reality.

We’re going to start basing off of this Necromancer.

We’re going to toss out a lot of the area affect spells, but things like Vamperic Touch and Withering Touch, those will be using the claws to slash at the victim. We’re tossing out Ray of Sickness from the first level spells and adding in Disguise Self, if I remember form my movie watching, you don’t always realize that it’s Freddy right away and when you do it’s too late. At second level we’d go with Alter Self, Hold Person, and Misty Step. The Hold Person is going to be the person being so afraid that they can’t do anything, and Misty Step is how they can seemingly always be walking behind you slowly and your running, but when  you turn around, they are always there. At level 3 spells, bestow curse and vamperic touch are both good options and I’d add in Fear as the final spell at that level. Level four spells, dimension door, for when you want to walk through a wall, and hallucinatory terrain are two really strong options, then Phantasmal Killer makes them see their

worst nightmare in their head, which would be you, and deals psychic damage to them. At fifth level dream is an obvious choice, because it allows you to shape their dreams, never allowing them to be properly rested for when you attack and then Dominate Person, again using it as a fear sort of affect this spell would work well. And finally circle of death, you could attack a whole party while they sleep by using this spell.

I’d then figure out a way to give yourself a half-orc life ability where you, the first time you would hit zero hit points, come back up to some low number of hit points. This is classic horror monster where you never are really dead the first time and to ignore that ability would just be a shame.

Beyond that, I’d primarily leave it the same for the rest of the ability stats for Freddy Krueger and the necromancer.

So how would you use Freddy Krueger in a game?

I mean, I’d consider using something of the standard story from Nightmare on Elm Street.  They were horribly burned and disfigured in a fire of something that they were wrongly (or rightly) accused of. Everyone thinks that they are dead and the whole village is covering up what has happened, but really you’re alive, and you’ve been biding your time. Now you’re back for revenge. But you’re not that strong (In our build they have 66 HP, but their armor class is only 12 and can’t go higher). So you’re stalking and killing all of the children of the people who burned you when they were younger.

But if you don’t want to go with the exact Nightmare on Elm Street story, you could instead give yourself a demonic background where you are from one of the pits of hell and you’ve come to destroy a certain person who you did kill. But even once you had finished your deed, you weren’t released by the person who had called you forth. You had to do their bidding until one day you were able to get out from under them and are now free to cause terror. And you’ve been used to working in the night and in the shadows killing those while they sleep. This would give you, as the DM, a bigger bad guy to play around with, and while the players might think that your Freddy is the big bad guy, you can then find out that there was someone controlling him for a while.

How would you use Freddy Krueger in your D&D campaign? Do you think I missed anything obvious that I should have added into it?

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I’m taking the vampire from D&D 5e Roll 20 which can be found here.

The first thing we have to do is change it’s weakness. It’s supposed to take damage in the sunlight, but that’s clearly not the case. They just instead, sparkled. Shudder. And to do that, you give them a new trait called ‘Sparkliness’. In this, they now have disadvantage on stealth in the sunlight. Not only that, they also cannot surprise someone when out in sunlight. Oh, vampire wants to sneak up on you during the day, yeah, there’s a beacon from miles away. They can still “hide” in that they can still get partial to  full cover from hiding, but you’ll never, as a player, wonder where the vampire is.

Next, to keep the vampires in proper alignment with the writing level of the book, you have to remove 10 from the intelligence stat. Those aren’t well written books, and while I haven’t actually read a whole one of them, I have seen experts, and I did watch the first movie, so I can say, these vampires are a little bit dumb. Probably drop 5 from wisdom as well, and you got the average Twilight vampire. We’ll leave the charisma alone, because apparently teenage girls still like them.

Finally, build wise, to get the full flavor, we have to look at their charm ability. Like I said above, they have a high charisma, so that means that they should be smooth and charming, but charm isn’t really accurate. It would make more sense to reflavor this ability as brooding. The rest of the ability can stay the same, but whenever you refer to the effect, it shall be known as brooding.

So how do you work this monster into your game?

I would do the satirical version of Curse of Strahd. Make the world as light and happy as possible. The vampire brings the adventurers to this realm so that they can help him find his long lost love. By long lost love, I mean the manic pixie dream girl whom he happened to see in the flower shop next to his massive gothic manor once, a week ago, and has determined that he is madly in love with her. He has a lot of quests for them to go on, once they have found the girl. They have to try and find out what she likes, they have to figure out what type of flowers to get her, they have to find a book of poetry that fits her personality just right because he’s just too brooding and quiet to do any of that on his own. Eventually, things will come to a head and the girl will tell him that she just needs the freedom to be her and that nothing can truly pin her down. Then, the already brooding vampire becomes more brooding, and it affects the weather so that it always raining. Actually, this could just be the history of Strahd that you play before the Curse of Strahd.

Tune in next time for more bad ideas in the Monster Factory. If you have any funny/dumb characters to build that can be used as monsters in your games, feel free to go ahead and send me ideas on Twitter, you can find my information below.

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