Monster Slayers from Xanathar's Guide is Van Helsing

D&D Beyond talks to WotC's Jeremy Crawford about the Monster Slayer subclass. "So the monster slayer in the ranger is a subclass that's basically all about letting you play Van Helsing. This is the Ranger who is the pro at hunting down not only creatures of the night - vampires, werewolves etc - but is also the bane of evil spellcasters. This is the Ranger who is a bit more bookish we imagine than the typical Ranger, the one who knows all sorts of interesting tidbits about different monsters and how to defeat them."



"This subclass actually started in the Unearthed Arcana process as a fighter subclass. People responded pretty well to it but as we worked on it we really felt that the subclass would be even better as a part of the Ranger class where the class would gain access to a number of the Ranger's magical abilities, the Ranger's favored foe abilities these sorts of things that all were a natural fit for this person who is the best at hunting down these vile creatures. The the subclass itself I think is super fun; it has a number of additional spells it knows all about trapping otherworldly creatures - you know spells like magic circle, hold monster, also banishment to send fell creatures off to other planes, but probably my favorite bit in this subclass is its ability to foil a dark spellcaster's magic. Now people can already do this in the game using counterspell; this ranger can do it just using a particular class feature on top of that. It also works against other people who are trying to teleport away, so this is a this is one of the few characters in the game where if as long as the foe is is close enough this Ranger has a chance to magically foil the person's ability to suddenly teleport out of a battle and get away. Because again this is this is the Van Helsing figure who is going to stop that creature of darkness who can normally escape from others, but not from this Ranger.

This ranger also has early-on ability and this goes back to the idea that this ranger knows potentially a little bit about every monster, the ability to discern whether a monster has damage immunities, damage resistances, condition immunities, that sort of thing, so this is then going to be the character who can help the group figure out "How do we stop this monster that has bedeviled us of our weapons' work against it?". Whereas this is this is the the character who who is more quickly going to figure out we need to use silvered weapons or we need a magical weapon or stop using fire, that kind of thing.

Now many groups figure these sorts of things out through trial and error and then they remember them because "Oh we fought these creatures before we know they're immune to these sorts of attacks". This is the sort of character, the monster slayer, who in contrast has the potential to figure those things out upon first meeting a monster and this chance is really representing the fact that this monster slayer is assumed to have been doing studying before their adventuring and during, always learning new things about monsters.

So as a lover of especially old Hammer horror films, and pretty much gothic horror stories of any sort, and in October I have a kind of an endless diet of those things at night given that taste of mine, this is a ranger subclass I'm particularly excited about."