The Dungeons & Dragons version of Slender Man is awesome, perfect.

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravensoft, The latest book of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, will arrive on 18 May. This reboot of the classic role-playing universe is a home run, full of new content and good guidance for players. Inside you will find an extensive compilation of horror-themed adventures, along with dozens of new monsters. And there’s something really bizarre, right outside of your peripheral vision – the skinny man’s version of D&D.

[Warning: This post contains mild spoilers for Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.]

The Slender Man is a piece of Internet creepypasta that has developed its own life, a gangly terror that waits in the darkness to drive people away. Modern folklore has given rise to films, video games, documentary films, and dozens of memes. Wizards of the Coast senior designer Wesley Schneider knew he needed something like an awesome figure for this Van Richten Guide.

Image: Sean Wood / Wizard of the Coast

“D&D Concept Illustrator Sean Wood and I Wanted […] A panic that has always been – always been right in the background – but that you never noticed, “Schneider said Dragon plus magazine. “Being close to home for D&D adventurers, and those once they know about it, they can’t find out about it. Genie out of the bottle. Is in danger always

Are you there

The solution was a creature known only as the Bagman, and he comes with a legend.

According to Van Richten’s Guide, Bagman is an urban narrative within Ravenoft’s fiction. The story goes that while running away one adventurer left his party and crawled inside a bag of holding, a portable pocket of extraditable space that the parties usually carry around to capture their loot. Once inside, this hapless hero could not find a way out again.

An excerpt from “Over Time,” reads Van Richten’s Guide, “The strange forces of this magical middle place transformed the adventurer into a demonic creature. Now, every night, the bagman slips from the bag holding it randomly. If he doesn’t find his home, he pulls someone back in the bag with him. “

The only clue that the bagman has been there? A missing person, and a strange trinket “from the hidden kingdom of his lost junk.”