Leftovers With Legs

The Reanimator Artificer Finally Gets Its Due

Somewhere in the Dungeon of Devourement, something is being stitched back together that really ought to have stayed dead. Nobody's screaming, which is the worrying part, the screaming would at least suggest the thing on the table objects to being here. It doesn't. It never does. That's rather the point of a Reanimated Companion: you don't build loyalty into a corpse. You wire it in.

Wizards of the Coast has finally given the Artificer its own resident mad scientist. The Reanimator arrives in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, and unlike five of its six subclass siblings in that book, the College of Spirits Bard, the Grave Domain Cleric, the Phantom Rogue, and so on, all of them returning faces from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft wearing a fresh coat of 2024-rules paint, the Reanimator has never existed before. It first surfaced in last year's Horror Subclasses Unearthed Arcana, and it's one of only two genuinely new subclasses to survive that playtest into print. Which matters more than it sounds like it should, because the Artificer has spent most of 5th Edition's life as the class WotC forgot to invite to the Player's Handbook. It debuted in Eberron, got the occasional charity subclass, and has otherwise been treated like a hobbyist's side project. The Reanimator is the clearest sign yet that somebody at Wizards actually likes the class and wants it to eat at the big table.

Good. It's earned it. And it's earned it by doing something most subclasses don't bother with: giving you a pet you're contractually obligated to eventually murder.

Building Your Best Friend Out of Spare Parts

At 3rd level, a Reanimator can spend a Magic action and a set of Artisan's Tools to assemble a Reanimated Companion, a Medium undead that pops into existence in a spare five-foot square looking however grim your imagination allows, because the rules are refreshingly indifferent to your aesthetic choices. Mechanically, it's tougher than it has any right to be: armour class of 10 plus your Intelligence modifier, hit points equal to five plus five times your Artificer level, and a Dreadful Swipe attack that rolls off your spell attack bonus rather than a separate stat block entry, which is the game quietly admitting that this thing is an extension of you rather than a summoned ally with its own agenda.

Two features make it sing. First, it's immune to lightning and actually heals from it , Lightning Absorption turns any bolt aimed at your Companion into a free top-up. Second, and this is the bit that tells you everything about the subclass's sense of humour: when the Companion dies, it doesn't just die. It has a trait called Death Burst, and it detonates in a 10-foot spray of necrotic energy that you get to aim, on purpose, at whoever's standing nearby. You didn't just lose your monster. You weaponised its death on the way out. There is something almost tender about designing a creature whose last act, guaranteed, is doing one more thing for you.

Jolt to Life, and Other Reasons to Love a Cantrip

The Reanimator also gets a genuinely clever rework of Spare the Dying, called Jolt to Life. Normally that cantrip just stabilises a dying creature, a shrug of a spell, mechanically speaking. Here, you can run it through the Companion's namesake current and have it revive the target with hit points instead, while every creature you choose within ten feet makes a Dexterity save against a burst of lightning damage that scales as you level, eventually hitting 4d4 at 17th level. You can pull this trick a number of times equal to your Intelligence modifier before a Long Rest resets it. It's a mercy and a threat delivered in the same three seconds, which is about as on-theme for a horror splatbook as design gets.

Your spell list leans hard into the aesthetic too, False Life and Witch Bolt at 3rd level, Animate Dead and Lightning Bolt by 9th, Death Ward and Blight at 13th, Raise Dead waiting at the top. It reads less like a spell list and more like a shopping list for somebody building a very specific kind of laboratory.

The Subclass Grows a Conscience (Then Loses It Again)

At 5th level you choose a Strange Modification for your Companion, Arcane Conduit, which lets you cast through it and channel your Intelligence into your damage rolls when it's nearby, or Ferocity, which just makes the thing hit harder. By 9th level, Improved Reanimation quadruples that Death Burst to 4d4 and lets its necrotic damage ignore resistance, while Macabre Modifications gives you a second Strange Modification slot and unlocks three new, increasingly unwell options: Bloated (a shove-happy brute that supercharges its own death explosion), Gaunt (fast, climbing, and actively frightening to be near), and Moist, yes, that's the official term, which turns your Companion into something that punishes anyone who dares hit it in melee with a splash of acid.

Then 15th level arrives and the subclass shows its true face. Refined Reanimation lets you cast Raise Dead for free once per Long Rest, upgrades your Strange Modifications to three at once, and gives you Life Transfer: a Reaction that lets you drain your Companion's remaining hit points straight into your own body, killing it instantly and triggering the Death Burst as a parting gift. You can love this creature exactly as much as you like right up until the moment its continued existence becomes less useful to you than its death. That's not a bug in the flavour text. That's the entire flavour text.

There's a reason this lands harder than most companion-class abilities. Players get genuinely attached to the things they build with their own hands, more attached, often, than to allies they simply meet, because ownership implies control, and control implies safety. The Reanimator systematically dismantles that illusion. You built it. You control exactly when it dies. And the game hands you a mechanical incentive to pull that trigger yourself, which is a far crueller trick than simply taking the choice away from you. Horror rarely works by removing your options. It works by making the option you'd rather not take the correct one.

It's not hard to see why this would feel right at home in a dungeon built entirely on the logic that nothing goes to waste, least of all a corpse with a few more good swipes left in it.

Satan's Favourite Reanimators (An Unsolicited Reading List)

Our DM has opinions about mad science, obviously, and has been threatening to run a Reanimator NPC since roughly the moment the Unearthed Arcana dropped. If you're building one of your own, here's the family tree Harrie keeps pointing at.

Herbert West, Reanimator. The patron saint of the subclass and, frankly, the funniest possible starting point. Lovecraft's original 1922 serial gave us a protagonist whose scientific rigour is completely divorced from anything resembling wisdom, ethics, or self-preservation, a man who solves "my experiment came back wrong" by simply running the experiment again, louder. The Stuart Gordon film adaptation leaned into the gore with a glee that's aged into something closer to comedy than horror, and that's honestly the correct register for a Reanimator PC. Play this one for the laugh line, but let the laugh curdle a little every time the Companion dies exactly on schedule.

Frankenstein's Creature. The obvious one, and rightly so, Mary Shelley wrote the blueprint for every "I made a person and now I have to live with that" story that followed, including this subclass. What makes it worth revisiting rather than just referencing is that Shelley's novel isn't actually about the monster being evil. It's about the horror of being abandoned by your creator the instant you become inconvenient. Any Reanimator player who wants real pathos rather than just a lightning-and-viscera aesthetic should steal from here: the tragedy isn't the Companion's death, it's how casually its creator arranges it.

Edward Scissorhands. The left-field pick, and the one that rewards actually thinking about it. Tim Burton's 1990 film is a reanimation story with the gore filed off, an artificial man built by a dying inventor, finished with shears instead of hands, and released into a world that finds him fascinating right up until it decides he's dangerous. It's the gentlest possible take on the "created thing" archetype, and it's a useful reminder that a Reanimated Companion doesn't have to be a growling brute. Sometimes the most unsettling version is the one built with tenderness, dropped into a world with no idea what to do with tenderness, and eventually discarded anyway.

Three very different corpses, three very different lessons, one unifying thread: something was built to be useful, briefly, and then it wasn't. That's not a design flaw of the Reanimator. That's the whole meal.