Brand new feats for vampire-touched characters in D&D 2024
Astarion’s Book of Hungers is a sort of DLC digital supplement to the Forgotten Realms books dedicated to players that want to play characters with a vampiric influence (like everyone’s favourite Baldur’s Gate 3 vampire). You can choose to take the Dhampir species, but if you want to enhance those vampiric powers, or want the powers of a vampire hunter, then there are also 16 feats to choose from too.
The Forgotten Realms books go a little feat wild with 34 feats featured already in Heroes of Faerun, bringing the grand total up to a whopping 50 feats. You also can read my analysis of the origin feats, general feats and epic boon feats from Heroes of Faerun.
In this article, I’m going to analyse each of these 16 vampiric feats and work out which are fang-tastic and which are a bleeding mess!
Vampiric feats
Astarion’s Book of Hungers brings us 16 vampiric related feats. 3 of these are origin feats, 3 are epic boon feats and the other 10 are general feats.
Below I’ve gone into detail about how good each of these feats are and whether it’s worth taking on these vampiric abilities:
Origin feats
Tireless reveler – 4/5
Related background: Carouser
Good for: Anyone, but especially those that perform high impact tests like rogues.
Ability: Gain heroic inspiration when nearby allies use it. This can be done multiple times per rest.
Tactics: For this, you really need allies with a steady stream of heroic inspiration so that they can use it regularly allowing you to regenerate it too. You get plenty of opportunities to replenish it so I’d also make sure that you use it regularly, giving you the freedom to replenish and use this often.
At least one ally with the musician origin feat will really help here.
Vampire hunter – 2/5
Relevant background: Vampire survivor
Good for: Those that want a bit more resilience
Ability: Advantage escaping from non-magical restraints or the grappled condition. Once per rest, reduce necrotic damage by a number of d6s equal to your proficiency bonus.
Tactics: So the advantage here is on escaping restraints or the grappled condition, not preventing it unfortunately. Still, grapples are reasonably common. Necrotic damage may be common in certain campaigns and less so in others. I suspect the reduced damage is often going to be better than necrotic resistance on an individual hit, but chances are, if you’re hit once in an encounter by necrotic damage, that you’ll be hit multiple times. This will only protect you once, likely making this inferior overall.
I suppose these things are OK, but honestly, advantage against the grappled condition and necrotic resistance would have been better and not overpowered. It’s also a bit passive for a character that goes about ‘hunting’ vampires.
Vampire’s plaything – 4/5
Relevant background: Vampire devotee
Good for: Pretty much anyone other than rogues and monks, especially hit and run builds.
Ability: Create a potion of healing or antitoxin each long rest and you can use a bonus action to take the dash or disengage action. Your former master can also speak to you telepathically and you can allow them to perceive through your senses.
Tactics: A healing potion each day is handy for anyone and just a generally great option. Dash and disengage as bonus actions are also really useful. Rogues and monks already get this so it’s worthless for them, but other potential hit and run builds might find this useful. This includes the likes of melee warlocks, valor bards, sea druids and war clerics.
Other martials may also find this useful for manoeuvring around the battlefield more easily. And broadly, any class will likely find this useful at some point.
Your former vampire master’s ability to speak to you and sense through you is more relevant for stories and side quests than mechanics so one to discuss with your DM.
General feats
Bloodlust – 4/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: High hit die classes, especially tanky martials like barbarians and fighters.
Ability score improvement: Strength, dexterity or constitution
Ability: Your hit point die always rolls a minimum of 3 and when you hit a bloodied creature, roll a hit point die and heal that amount plus your constitution modifier a few times per long rest.
Tactics: It’s not too hard to hit bloodied creatures and that’s free healing during combat (other than the cost of a hit die). This will be more impactful for characters with a larger hit die, like barbarians and fighters. Barbarians will do especially well here as they have the largest hit dice, tend to have a high constitution and their rage reduces a lot of incoming damage so those benefits scale with that damage reduction.
On that note, you’ll want to get your constitution as high as possible for this.
Bomber – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Thrown weapon fighting, especially rogues and monks, but also barbarians and a few other builds that also need dexterity.
Ability score improvement: Dexterity
Ability: Longer range throwing of vials and flasks. Thrown attacks also don’t impose disadvantage at long range.
Tactics: This is obviously for those using thrown weapon fighting. This might include things like rogues dual wielding daggers at range or strength based characters making ranged attacks. That range for thrown weapons can be quite stifling so this increases that a fair bit. As an example, this gives a dagger a thrown range without disadvantage of 60ft (up from 20 ft) or a javelin from 30ft to 120ft which is a substantial upgrade.
The challenge you have here is that you must take a dexterity increase. This isn’t necessarily bad for a strength build, some of these still need dexterity, like barbarians for their unarmored defense. But realistically, many thrown builds are strength based and the lack of a strength improvement is a little problematic here.
Cloying mists – 2/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: No one. Just take magic initiate and grab fog cloud if that’s what you want.
Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma
Ability: You can cast fog cloud and get a free casting. It also extinguishes non-magical flames and slows creatures by 5ft.
Tactics: Fog cloud is a decent option to have. If you want to build for it, it’s not that hard though and magic initiate can get you fog cloud anyway. In fact magic initiate will get you 2 cantrips and a choice of a level 1 spell that can be changed making it far superior to this as I’m not sure the extra benefits of fog cloud are really worth having less spells and the limited options. Even better, you can take magic initiate at level 1. The only advantage this has is an ability score improvement.
Delicious pain – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Tanks and frontline martials other than barbarians
Ability score improvement: One of your choice
Ability: After taking bludgeoning, piercing or slashing damage, use a reaction to gain resistance to these damage types until your next turn.
Tactics: This can only be used at most, once per encounter and only lasts at most a round. It won’t reduce the damage you just took so ideally, you’ll want to use it soon after your turn to give yourself the most time possible to resist damage.
This also means it’ll be better on tanks that are trying to draw plenty of attacks to themselves as they’re more likely to receive followup attacks against themselves. Just don’t take it for a barbarian, they already get much better benefits from their rage.
My issue with this is it’s a little too easy to not get much benefit from this, but I still think it’s decent if used at the right moments.
Light bringer – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Characters with larger hit dice.
Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma
Ability: Can cast the light spell and make its light sunlight. While in sunlight, you can use a bonus action to expend a hit die to heal once per rest.
Tactics: The light spell can be useful, making it sunlight can be a problem for vampires and a few other creatures. The healing is the best part here. Obviously outside during the day, this is easy to contrive. In the dark, the light spell’s sunlight can help you get around this.
I prefer the healing from bloodlust. You have more control over when it’s used, it doesn’t cost a bonus action and the healing per roll is higher. But this is OK.
Love bites – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Martials and potentially those wanting to land more opportunity attacks.
Ability score improvement: One ability score
Ability: Use a bonus action to automatically charm a creature you just hit for a turn.
Tactics: You’ll only be able to use this once per encounter at most, but it works automatically which can cause some problems for tough creatures, even those with legendary resistance. They can just attack someone else in the party though, and maintaining this will require not attacking the charmed creature.
There is potentially a way to make this work where you charm a creature, they moves away from you to attack an ally and you then use an opportunity attack on them. This could be a particularly handy way for a rogue to deal an extra sneak attack. Just be aware that the creature could then move back towards you and attack you now.
Putrefy – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Spellcasters with necrotic spells.
Ability score improvement: One ability score
Ability: Cause a creature to become poisoned for a turn when you deal necrotic damage once per rest.
Tactics: The poisoned condition is automatic, but just for a single turn. It’s a handy debuff, but necrotic damage mostly only comes from spells. Still, a cleric using spirit guardians can easily apply this condition.
Rebuke – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Grapple builds and spellcasters with radiant damage spells.
Ability score improvement: One ability score
Ability: Cause a creature you hit with radiant damage to have the prone condition.
Tactics: You’ll want to knock creatures prone when you and allies can then make melee attacks against them. This will give advantage on these attacks. The topple weapon mastery property can do this, but this works automatically. You can also combine this with grappling to keep your target down too.
This is similar to putrefy. Putrefy is for causing enemies to have disadvantage on attacks, this is to give you and your allies advantage on attacks against your enemy. If you can keep the enemy down because you have a grapple build, then this will also cause your opponent to have disadvantage on attack rolls and make the condition more permanent. For this reason, a paladin might be your best option here.
Treacherous allure – 1/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Spellcasters I suppose, but it’s not great.
Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma
Ability: You can cast the charm person spell and do so once for free. You also have attack rolls against creatures with the charmed condition.
Tactics: Charm person for me is a bit too limited. The time is short, it’s hard to land during combat and a lot of effort at those points. I think the tactic here is to cast charm person before the fight breaks out and then make an attack with advantage. This is a bit contrived but workable, but will only work against a single target for a single attack (as once you’ve attacked them, the charmed condition will end). This all feels a bit too contrived to me and I can see problems in the lead up here.
The alternative here is relying on others imposing the charmed condition, which could definitely occur through someone like a glamour bard. It’s still quite contrived though.
Vampire touched – 3/5
Requirements: Level 4+
Good for: Spellcasters mostly, but anyone that wants to scout or have more manoeuvrability will benefit here.
Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma
Ability: You learn the spider climb spell and one other level 1 spell from the enchantment or illusion schools of magic.
Tactics: This is sort of an equivalent of fey touched or shadow touched with different spell options. These are pretty good and I’d argue that misty step and invisibility are both better than spider climb. Still, spider climb is decent and definitely has it’s place.
Epic boon feats
Boon of blazing dawn – 3/5
Requirements: Level 19+
Good for: Martials that still deal bludgeoning, piercing or slashing damage.
Ability score improvement: One of your choice
Ability: Immunity to radiant damage, can make weapon attacks deal radiant damage, cause attacks to emit sunlight.
Tactics: Radiant damage isn’t mega common, but immunity is decent. Some classes will already be replacing their attacks with another kind of damage, but many won’t. And even many magic weapons will only cause different damage for some of their attacks. Allowing your attacks to be radiant should bypass a lot of resistances unless you’re fighting celestials.
Attacks that emit sunlight are only situationally useful, say if you’re fighting vampires or in the dark.
Boon of looming shadows – 5/5
Requirements: Level 19+
Good for: Melee martials, and it works for hit and run tactics and just surviving a lot of attacks on the front lines.
Ability score improvement: One ability score
Ability: Melee attacks have an extra 10ft reach on your turn, you can also take the dodge action as a bonus action.
Tactics: Long reach is really good for martials wanting to steer clear of enemy reach or anyone else wanting to reach more creatures. This doesn’t affect opportunity attacks unfortunately as it only lasts on your turn and characters with bonus action attacks like the war cleric, must still take the attack action to benefit from this.
The dodge action as a bonus action is excellent. It means you can almost always be hard to hit. Rogues for example, won’t need to use their cunning actions to disengage (because of their longer reach) with hit and run tactics so can instead attack, dodge and still move away from enemies. Monks attack with their bonus action though, so you may find more conflict for them here. Frontline martials like fighters can dodge more attacks while maximising on their actions for attacks. This is a really good epic boon feat.
Boon of misty escape – 1/5
Requirements: Level 19+
Good for: No one, just play an Orc instead.
Ability score improvement: Intelligence, wisdom or charisma
Ability: Cast an improved gaseous form on yourself when reduced to 0HP and instead drop to 1HP.
Tactics: My main issue with this is you now have 1HP, so there’s nothing stopping an enemy hitting you again before it’s your turn unless you happen to be lucky enough to drop to 0HP for the last attack possible before your turn. This makes it only slightly better than an Orc’s ability to also survive a killing blow. You may now have an improved gaseous form, but you still only have resistance to physical attacks which won’t do you much good on 1HP.
It would have been very easy to expand the healing or have you teleport away simultaneously to make this a workable level 19+ feat.
If you do survive, longer than a turn, the healing can be useful and the increased speed is better. There is a way to abuse this slightly. If you end a combat and look pretty damaged, you could get an ally to punch you down to 0HP so you can use this. With its hour duration, it should fully heal you. I don’t think this should be allowed, but it mechanically does work. Otherwise, this isn’t a great epic boon feat.
Are the feats in Astarion’s Book of Hungers any good?
Not all the vampiric feats here are hits, but most are at least decent and worth considering on the right build. Some feats, like vampire hunter and cloying mists feel like disappointments while the likes of treacherous allure and boon of misty escape feel like they completely miss the mark.
Still, there’s a decent bunch of options here for those wanting to dive into a more vampire infested adventure.
What did you think of the vampiric feats in Astarion’s Book of Hungers? Let me know in the comments below.
Spotlight on the Forgotten Realms books
Our latest guides on the Heroes of Faerun books.
