These are awesome ideas. Love the inspiration.

First.

This is great! I especially love the idea of a spirit wishing to set their own record straight, and give credit where credit is due. It seems like an interesting adventure, particularly if you tie it in to the characters. For example, the spirit could be the spirit of the founder of a character's paladin order, trying to get people to stop hailing him when it was truly his little sister who did all the heroic acts, or a wizards mentor who stole his famed spellbook from an apprentice.

You could also have a spirit patron, who only meets the party on Dia de los Muertos, using their prophetic sight to give the party instructions for the year to come. Unfortunately, they can only stay a little while, so they have to leave a lot up to interpretation...

Also, because of the character art in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that already exists for this subclass, ya'll probably thought of this already. But this would be perfect for a phantom rogue! Perhaps they are guided by the spirit of their dead abuela and abuelo, a powerful fighter and cleric, who are unsure of the path their grandchild has chosen, but try to support their sneaky tendencies.

I kind of like the idea that not all undead are evil but most are

I think I caught a typo in this article. In the sentence "A warlock destroyed a hoard of zombies on their own", it should be "horde" instead of "hoard".

Really cool idea!

I always love when the party encounters a spirit of a villain that they had previously killed. It certainly allows you to add a sort of melancholy depth to that character posthumously. It maybe also makes the players feel a greater sense of agency, in that they've actually helped shape the world around them and can view the consequences. Being able to speak to an enemy already slain and otherwise disregarded really adds to that I think.

probably the best forum post I've seen.

More ways to lay out backstory are always welcome!

I love the idea; the shift in directions has vastly improved the flexibility of the character creation and immersion aspect of the game. However, I feel like there could be bolder strides in ethical and cultural diversity. This does generally fall on the DM to take initiative when creating their world, and its being an "Open to Change" format allows for that kind of inclusiveness. Though, using the above art as an example, Dios de los Muertos is very distinctly a festival celebrated by dozens of people, countries, and cultures from around the world. The above art is still using very classical armoring and "European'esk" tones in the styling. I think the issue is that the artwork projects a very minimalistic presentation of what this practice was based on. NOT BAD ARTWORK, certainly better than anything I could do. However, I think that, especially given current geopolitical circumstances, maybe we need to take a stronger approach at our methods of cultural representation and how some of these approaches need revisiting to stay up-to-date on modern cultural battles and the ethical challenges of the current generations. 

Still a wonderful idea, Dios de los Muertos is a wonderful Latin/Hispanic and Indigenous spiritual day :3 

I greatly appreciate this article, as it not only draws on real world relatable culture, but also opens up an entirely new way to interact with the game, it fundamentally opens your players up to see monsters in an entirely new light.  So many have been painted in flat black and white for so long: monster = bad, kill monster.

However, I'm deducting points because you opened the article with one of my pet peeves.  It's Día de Muertos.  There is no "los".  That typically gets added in when someone reverse-translates Day of the Dead back into Spanish.  And you should have known that.  No te hagas gringonismos con ese spanglish.

Dude, if you survey the art in in most of mainline 5e... they are absolutely NOT skimping on diverse representation any longer.  ToA and especially CoS had their issues with two source cultures (and both were reedited to help with this), but even then the art wasn't the problem.  All the player-facing material is brimming with variety when it comes to humanoid art, starting right with the PHB that famously chose to make most humans black (and less generic in their costuming)!  Even in VRGtM, where most of the settings are rooted in specific European templates, they mixed in plenty of skin tones and fashions.  

More to the point: the art they used here was not commissioned for this article, and though I've forgotten which of the very recent books had it, I'm quite sure it was meant to represent a paladin communing with her ancestors in the same order.  That makes it THE perfect pick for the theme of this article.  The fact that she's white and wearing plate is not a sign of some oversight at WotC/Beyond.

(And yeah, Day of the Dead IRL seems awesome from what little I know of it.)  

cool. i have a character (leila mesqu/ashtou) who was uh in...love...with another one of my characters (shacrya mesqu), both of which first appeared in the same campaign. shacrya, a tiefling, was killed by her fellow adventurers during an auction (dont worry, it was a compromise :). yes, I know, it really is pathetic...death by death note, and for a kind and respectful tiefling. now leila can carry shacrya's special necklace called "the devwu emblem," a purple necklace with a gold chain and lining, creating the appearance of an eye closed with eyelashes. thx for reading this paragraph of a comment! :3

The "flesh out a past villain" gave me an interesting idea for a low-level intrigue adventure: the villain is a ghost or spirit or some other sort of incorporeal being, and the players can't physically interact with(damage/kill) them, but they also aren't able to influence the world on their own. The villain is still a person with a lot of influence everywhere in society, with a silver tongue that bends people to their will, or maybe is head of some sort of cult or other organization. That lets the players roleplay with the villain and keeps the villain in the plot, but also makes sure they find a creative way to bring the villain down from power, instead of just hacking&slashing them, perhaps turning their own minions against them. Maybe their minions are the only people capable of harming the villain because they are the ones helping the villain stay in the world on other days of the year, and the first part is about finding that out, then they are forced not to just go in and kill everyone. 

Great article, lots of interesting ideas. I look forward to more!

Great article! It would be interesting to take the "setting the record straight" idea even further by having the adventurers be thrust into the past, or a projection of it, learning the truth by experiencing the events first hand.

There was a 3e splatbook that was basically this as a campaign setting.

honestly rereading articles like these make me wish there was a bookmarking system on dndbeyond!!