Homebrew Dhampir Species Details

Poised between the worlds of the living and the dead, dhampirs retain their grip on life yet are endlessly tested by vicious hungers. Their ties to the undead grant dhampirs a taste of a vampire’s deathless prowess in the form of increased speed, darkvision, and a life-draining bite.

With unique insights into the nature of the undead, many dhampirs become adventurers and monster hunters. Their reasons are often deeply personal. Some seek danger, imagining monsters as personifications of their own hungers. Others pursue revenge against whatever turned them into a dhampir. And still others embrace the solitude of the hunt, striving to distance themselves from those who’d tempt their hunger.

Dhampir Hungers

Every dhampir knows a thirst slaked only by the living. Those who overindulge their thirst risk losing control and forever viewing others as prey. Those who resist might find exceptional ways of controlling their urges or suppress them through constant, molar-grinding restraint. In any case, temptation haunts dhampirs, and circumstances conspire to give them endless reasons to indulge.

While many dhampirs thirst for blood, your character might otherwise gain sustenance from the living. Roll on or choose an option from the Dhampir Hungers table to determine what tempts your character to feed.

Dhampir Hungers

D6	Hunger
1	Blood
2	Flesh or raw meat
3	Cerebral spinal fluids
4	Psychic energy
5	Dreams
6	Life energy

Dhampir Origins

Dhampirs often arise from encounters with vampires, but all manner of macabre bargains, necromantic influences, and encounters with mysterious immortals might have transformed your character. The Dhampir Origins table provides suggestions for how your character gained their lineage.

Dhampir Origins

D8	Origin
1	You are the reincarnation of an ancestor who was a vampiric tyrant.
2	Your pact with a predatory deity, fiend, fey, or spirit causes you to share their hunger.
3	You survived being attacked by a vampire but were forever changed.
4	A parasite lives inside you. You indulge its hunger.
5	Tragedy interrupted your transformation into an immortal.
6	You are a diminished form of an otherworldly being. Slaking your hunger hastens your renewal.
7	One of your parents was a vampire.
8	A radical experiment changed your body, making you reliant on others for vital fluids

 

Creating Your Character

At 1st level, you choose whether your character is a member of the human race or of a fantastical race. If you select a fantastical races. Alternatively, you can choose a lineage, you might havr once been member of another race, but you aren't any longer. You now possess only your lineage's racial traits.

When you create a character using lineage option here, follow these additional rules during character creation.

Ability Score Increases

When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy. The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You can follow those suggestions or ignore them, but you can’t raise any of your scores above 20.

If you are replacing your race with a lineage, replace any Ablility Score Increase you previously had with these.

Languages

Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of languages to choose from. The DM is free to modify that list for a campaign.

If you are replacing your race with a lineage, you retain any language you had and gain no new languages.

Creature Type

Every creature in D&D, including each player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race tells you what your character’s creature type is.

Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order: Aberration, Beast, Celestial, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Humanoid, Monstrosity, Ooze, Plant, Undead. These types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the cure wounds spell doesn’t work on a Construct or an Undead.

Life Span

The typical life span of a player character in the D&D multiverse is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure. Members of some races, such as dwarves and elves, can live for centuries. If typical members of a race can live longer than a century, that fact is mentioned in the race’s description.

Height and Weight

Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player’s Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.

Dhampir Traits

As a dhampir, you have the following racial traits.

Creature Type

You are a Humanoid.

Size

You are Medium or Small. You choose the size when you gain this lineage.

Speed

Your walking speed is 35 feet.

Ancestral Legacy

If you replace a race with this lineage, you can keep the following elements of that race: any skill proficiencies you gained from it and any climbing, flying, or swimming speed you gained from it.

• If you don't keep any of those elements or you choose this lineage at character creation, you gain proficency in two skills of your choice.

Darkvision

You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness as shades of gray.

Deathless Nature

You don't need to breathe.

Spider Climb

You have a climbing speed equal to your walking speed. In addition, at 3rd level, you can move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and upside down along ceilings, while leaving your hands free.

Vampiric Bite

Your fanged bite is a natural weapon, which counts as a simple melee weapon with which you are proficient. You add your Constitution modifier, instead of your Strength modifier, to the attack and damage rolls when you attack with this bite. It deals 1d4 piercing damage on a hit. While you are missing half or more of your hit points, you have advantage on attack rolls you make with this bite.

• When you attack with this bite and hit a creature that isn’t a Construct or an Undead, you can empower yourself in one of the following ways of your choice:
  • You regain hit points equal to the piercing damage dealt by the bite.
  • You gain a bonus to the next ability check or attack roll you make; the bonus equals the piercing damage dealt by the bite.
• You can empower yourself with this bite a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.