Reborn
by Prince Phantom
This race has so much roleplay potential that I could write about just that for pages and pages. You can be an undead minion that regained consciousness, a Frankenstein’s monster-like creature who’s been stitched together from multiple bodies, a deteriorating corpse who’s missing limbs are replaced with ghostly appendages, the potential is limitless. Whatever you are, your character is defined by their memories, or rather their lack thereof. A character who has lost parts of their memory of their past life is ripe for an amazing story, and your DM will love you for picking this race. But how well does it perform mechanically? Pretty great actually!
Reborn Features
Ancestral Legacy: Okay, so the Lineages in the Ravenloft book work a little differently than a normal race. You can select this race at character creation as normal, or you could potentially become this race through the events of your campaign. For Reborn, that event typically involves a brush with death in some form or another. This could potentially be a way to continue playing your character after they have died, or even as a punishment for getting close to dying a few too many times. This can be a very fun character motivation, but it can also be incredibly broken. The only things you retain from your old race are proficiencies and movement speeds, meaning if you were a flying race, you retain your flying speed. I’d reckon that a Winged Tiefling who has been turned into one of the three Ravenloft Lineages is probably the single strongest race in the game, and I don’t think it’s very close. I do not recommend that DMs allow this, or you play to this extreme. This race is plenty strong enough on its own, you don’t need to boost it with a fly speed.
Deathless Nature: This is a bunch of stuff wrapped into one feature, so let’s go over them each individually.
We have the standard poison damage resistance and advantage against being poisoned that many races have, plus advantage against diseases. That last part won’t come up very often, but I’m always happy to have poison resistance, as it’s one of the most common damage types dealt by monsters.
Advantage on death saves hopefully won’t come up very often, but you’ll be very happy when it does.
Not needing to eat or drink will only come up in the most dedicated of survival games, but if your DM rules that you can’t eat, that’s actually a big downside, as you can’t benefit from the Goodberry spell. Not needing to breathe is actually pretty great, and can come up quite a lot.
We don’t need to sleep and can’t be put to sleep by magic, and can complete a long rest in only 4 hours and while remaining conscious. Notably, we don’t get levels of exhaustion from going without a long rest, meaning you only need to take one if you need the benefits of a long rest. This adds a lot of extra time that your character can work during downtime on stuff like scribing scrolls or creating magic items, and even if you do need to take a long rest you’ve still got an extra 4 hours to accomplish stuff before the rest of your party wakes up. This also makes us the dedicated night watch, so you’ll want to invest in your perception a bit.
Knowledge From a Past Life: This is one of the best skill monkey features provided by any race, and makes the Reborn a surprisingly great choice if that’s the direction you want to take your character in.
The Reborn is probably the second best of the three Ravenloft lineages, and it’s all thanks to its defensive and utility features. That bit about not needing sleep can be incredibly useful to a player who knows how to take advantage of it. I also just love a race that has their lore built in and ready to make any character shine in terms of roleplay. This is a surprisingly great choice for skill monkey builds, and works great on just about any other build as well.
Final Rating: 4/5
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