Dead by Daylight’s next Killer is Dungeons & Dragons baddie Vecna

Dead by Daylight is a game absolutely packed with murderous monsters, both original and licensed from other franchises. The next crossover is a little bit outside of the usual horror wheelhouse — Dead by Daylight is producing a chapter themed around the wildly popular tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. Vecna, known in-game as The Lich, will be the game’s next Killer. Vecna is joined by a pair of Elven bards, one male and one female, who will serve as the new Survivors.

Behaviour Interactive announced the crossover during the game’s anniversary stream Tuesday, which included sneak peeks of other titles in the same universe and a new 2v8 gameplay mode.

Vecna is a powerful mage, with access to an array of spells. He can fly, summon spectral entities, create a mage hand to manipulate items, and dispel magic. While most Killers in Dead by Daylight focus on throwing hatchets or swinging a blade, Vecna uses magical abilities to hunt down Survivors. Luckily, there’s an upside to facing him as an enemy. When Vecna is the Killer, he spawns chests around the map. Opening them starts a dice roll, and if the player is lucky enough, they can obtain some of Vecna’s legendary loot.

The Eye and Hand of Vecna can be obtained from these chests. The Eye of Vecna grants invisibility to Survivors after they leave a locker, while the Hand of Vecna allows you to teleport between lockers. If you roll a critical failure, Behaviour promises something terrible happens — but we don’t know what quite yet.

With the runaway success of Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as the recent Dungeons & Dragons movie, it’s interesting to see Dungeons & Dragons expand even further by entering the illustrious cast of the asymmetrical horror game. Stranger Things, a show no stranger to D&D tie-ins, based its season four antagonist on Vecna, and they even share the same name — so maybe he’ll form a special bond with Stranger Things’ Dead by Daylight Killer, the Demogorgon, who was similarly named after a D&D monster.

Behaviour also teased the next licensed chapter, which will be a cross-over with the Castlevania franchise. We don’t know who the Killer or Survivor will be for that, but we can expect details later this summer. The stream also shared that a third licensed chapter will arrive before the end of Dead by Daylight’s next anniversary.

For fans who prefer the original aspects of Dead by Daylight, Behaviour shared a look at some other games in the same universe. The Casting of Frank Stone is a branching narrative game from Until Dawn developer Supermassive, similar to The Quarry or the Dark Pictures Anthology. A two-player co-op title called What the Fog is also briefly available for free with the registration of a Behaviour account, and it looks like a much cuter and absurd take on the Entity’s Realm.

The Dungeons & Dragons DLC is coming to the test realm today, and the chapter will release on live servers on June 3.