D&D 5E UA Revenant PC vs death by vampire bite

[Nuncle]

Hmm, in a "regular" D&D setting, that may indeed be the way things play out.
But I am also looking at this from the perspective of Curse of Strahd. In that, Strahd has brought the PC's there as his playthings. To torment them and also to see if they're worthy to be his successors.
So he might have different motives and may want to see if a Revenant is powerful enough to block his own abilities

 

[jayoungr]

Maybe it depends on whether the body is buried in the ground or not.

Buried = vampire spawn
Not buried = revenant

 

[epithet]

The revenant is already dead, living on borrowed time. I would actually destroy the revenant's body every time it died, then re-spawn it at some nearby appropriate place. I wouldn't vamp a revenant under any circumstances.

 

[Unwise]

A vampire that accidentally bites a reverent gets incredibly sick, starts throwing up uncontrollably and loses their magical powers for a while.

Drinking a dead mans blood has been a long standing no-no for vampires from a lot of sources for a lot of time. It has to be the case, otherwise a vampire could just go to the morgue and drink from the dead there. Which is really badwrongnofun and sparkly vampire goody-two-shoes stuff.

 

[Nevvur]

I think it bears repeating, since the question is about mechanics, the revenant subrace from Unearthed Arcana is not undead. This is not the same thing as the revenant from the Monster Manual. It's your prerogative to use lore surrounding revenants and vampires to inform your ruling, and as per my OP, this is in fact what I would do. However, I'm personally looking for interpretations of the mechanics.

See Gothic Heroes and Mike Mearls tweet.

 

[5Shilling]

In 5E the fiction and mechanics are not as separate as they once were. So while the revenant subrace may not have the undead trait (meaning it still has to eat and breathe) it is, thematically, a walking corpse, and so the DMs decision will lean heavily on that. Narrative first, mechanics second (or more specifically, the mechanics are there to determine events that are not automatically clear using narrative + common sense).

Plus you referenced undeath in your initial post. As you said there, mechanically there's nothing stopping a DM from turning a revenant into a vampire. The strong recommendation in the rules is that this would make them an NPC. As we've seen though, thematically and narratively it seems like the revenant is already cursed with, err, revenancy (?) and so could not be cursed again with vampirism, or lycanthropy, or whatever.

 

[jonathonhawke]

I would rule that the revenant becomes a vampire spawn, just like anyone else. However, if that vampire spawn is killed, the revenant will return to life 24 hours later as normal.