Let's Make... Trevor Belmont! — Vault Of The Sages

For today’s Let’s Make… we are crafting Trevor Belmont, specifically as seen in the Castlevania Anime. This particular version of Trevor Belmont is proficient with nearly any weapon, but specializes in the whip and the dagger/dart. The whip is a tricky weapon to use effectively, but we’ll hopefully solve that in today’s Let’s Make…

Trevor Belmont

D&D Beyond
https://ddb.ac/characters/57743611/bIy9MZ

So for those not familiar with the Netflix show, Trevor Belmont, is the last of his famous family, trained since birth to fight monsters. Skilled in a variety of weapons as well as unarmed combat, he is the master of the whip and blade, but will never hesitate to use a fist, foot, or elbow to get the job done. He is an incredible dealer of damage and can beat nearly any opponent in a one-on-one battle. There are very few ways to build an effective version of Trevor in 5th edition, but I think this one works…

First, let’s discuss his race. Clearly Trevor is a Human, and given his reliance on special combat abilities, we’re going to need all the feats we can get. For this reason I built Trevor as a variant human, though if your looking for something a little different you could always go with a custom lineage representing his Belmont heritage. This would also be the only other way get access to a feat at character creation.

For class, I went with 11 Kensei Monk, 9 Battle Master Fighter. The Kensai part of this build is critical to the character as a whole. The Kensai are based around the concept that they can pick a weapon of their choosing to be the focus of their monk abilities. For Trevor, that is the whip and the dart. At level 11, his Kensei weapons do 1d8 damage, fixing the primary problem with these weapons, their 1d4 base damage. In addition to the damage boost, they also get a host of Ki fueled abilities. For your whip your Ki points will boost your attack and damage rolls (Sharpen the Blade), as well as double the damage dice of the weapon (Deft Strike). These same abilities apply to your darts, plus the addition of Kensei’s shot, which allows you to to throw a dart as a bonus action, while adding another 1d4 damage. With these abilities, you will have no problem cranking out the damage, especially for targets 10 feet away, who can be struck by both weapons (due to the whip’s reach.

As for those that get in melee range, they’ll find themselves no better off. All of the baseline monk abilities shine here, like unarmed strike, Flurry of Blows and Stunning Strike. Just like in the show, when creatures get close to Trevor, he just punches them in the face.

While this build can more than handle it’s damage output for those in melee range, it also shines defensively as well. With a maxed wisdom and dexterity, Trevor gets to start out with a base AC of 20, but against a single target in melee, it can go even higher. The Defensive Dualist feat, at max level, ads another +6, and if you attacked the previous turn, the Kensei’s Agile Parry will give you another +2. This provides a solid 28 for melee attacks, 30 should you equip some bracers of defense.

While this provides you with all the basic kit you need to become Trevor Belmont, it is lacking some of the fancy tricks the character is capable of pulling off. And for that, we have the Battle Master.

Battle Master, and its base class of Fighter, adds a lot. We get the dualist fighting style, which adds +2 to our ever growing whip damage, and you get the standard stuff in the form of Second Wind and Action Surge. But what really adds the flavor here are the maneuvers. While many of them will fit the character, the ones I personally chose were:

Brace - The ability to attack people that enter your reach is great when your carrying a whip with reach.

Quick Toss- An easy way to fling a dart as a bonus action.

Riposte - Given Defensive Duelist allows you to to use your reaction when you get it, why not take this maneuver, allowing you to counterattack as a reaction when your attacker misses?

Disarming Attack - There’s nothing with more flavor that using a whip to yank a weapon out of someone’s hand. Well, tripping them would work too, so either would have been fine here.

Tactical Assessment - Not my favorite maneuver, but it fits too well with Trevor’s access to Belmont lore and tactics. That said, I would have preferred Trip.

Should you not like taking Tactical Assessment, you can always just stick with Know Your Enemy, which you could flavor as Trevor recalling what he knows about the adversary he is studying.

To round out Trevor, and to make up for the fact that I never gave him Rogue levels, he also has proficiency with Thieves Tools, and expertise in Stealth (both provided by the Prodigy feat, which also gave him intimidation, the only Charisma skill Trevor should know). I also gave him the Haunted One background which provided him with Survival, Investigation, and some additional languages, resulting in him knowing Infernal, Abyssal, and Deep Speech, which I figured his family would have taught him as part of his training. Once again, the Investigation choice was an acknowledgement of his family training.

Overall, I felt Trevor fit really well with 5th Edition, but that it was critical that he be a Kensei. Now on to Heroforge!

Trevor screenshot (1).png — Trevor Belmont

By Heroforge
https://www.heroforge.com/load_config%3D19952151/

Not every character is easy to recreate in Heroforge, but Alucard went quite well. Their trench coat, suit, and tie gave me most of his look, and they had a floppy brimmed hat that came pretty close to the original. I chose modern looking guns, which would be a bit out of place in D&D, but given they are eldritch in nature (and given the fact that Alucard is best suited to an Eberron-style setting), I still think it works. And although Heroforge’s familiar options are limited, a see-through shadow fox at least gives some representation of his shadow magic. Perhaps I should have thrown in some black tentacles as well.

Well that’s it for today’s Let’s Make… hopefully you enjoyed my version of Alucard.

Happy roleplaying, and may the dice be ever in your favor.