Tuesday, May 21, 2024

First Impressions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin

 Vecna: Eve of Ruin is the latest published adventure/campaign for 5th Edition D&D. It's both a 50th anniversary event for the game as a whole and the 10th anniversary thing for 5th Edition.

It's also only the second published adventure to take players all the way to level 20, focusing on stopping a plot by Vecna the Archlich, arguably D&D's most storied and infamous big bad, from utterly remaking all of reality in his image.

Structurally, the campaign takes you through various locations across different campaign settings as a kind of tour of the greatest hits - mainly of places touched on in 5th Edition, though with one of its chapters taking place in Greyhawk, which only got sort of looked at in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

The campaign uses a classic trope of "plot coupons," where you spend most of it assembling the Rod of Seven Parts in an attempt to disrupt Vecna's plans. That rod conveniently has, you know, seven parts, and thus you go on seven little mini-adventures (each of which I'd expect to take 2-4 sessions, depending on how RP-heavy your group is - some Adventurer's League power gamers might clear these in a single session).

There's a conceit that has you pretty rapidly showing up at the front door of the dungeons where these mini-adventure take place, so while I don't think this would be a quick and easy adventure, I'd be tempted as a DM to maybe draw these chapters out a little. The risk, of course, of hitting all of these locations so rapidly is that you don't get the chance to really sense their uniqueness. Granted, the chapters I've read were a starting "inciting incident" adventure set in Neverwinter, and then another Forgotten Realms-set adventure in the Underdark (in a Lolth cult hideout) followed by a wrecked Spelljammer vessel on the Astral Sea and in the body of the dead god that the ship had crashed into. I'm just starting the next chapter, set in Eberron, so we'll see how that does at really distinguishing its feel (having skimmed ahead, there's lots of Warforged).

Going to all these different settings, you also get a pretty big rogues' gallery, with major villains popping up and often able to be fought - though the appendix with the stat blocks for these folks also includes some descriptions for villains who show up, but that you don't actually fight (and thus don't have stat blocks).

One of the major themes of the story is secrets - Vecna is a God of Secrets, after all - and so there's a mechanic by which learning secrets in your adventures lets you use them as a tangible resource.

There's also a clever twist in the story that, obviously, from a DM's perspective, is spoiled instantly so that you can account for the secret the players are not aware of.

In terms of plunderability, there are obviously stat blocks for some big heavies of D&D lore, as well as some heroic/good (or at least neutral) characters. As far as I can tell there are not a lot of unique magic items.

Still, I think it's interesting to get this adventure that starts at level 10 - the book gives suggestions for how you could introduce new characters at this high level but also how to potentially integrate existing characters into the campaign - because several existing 5E adventures leave you around level 10 by the end, it even suggests having this as a follow-up (going from Curse of Strahd to this one could be interesting given that there's a chapter set in the Death House in Barovia that involves Strahd - might reinforce the idea of horror there that after all the effort to kill Strahd and escape, he's just back, and even the intro dungeon to CoS winds up having much more deadly threats).

Skipping ahead to the stat blocks, I noticed that Vecna's stats look very similar to the ones from the Vecna Dossier released a year or two ago (what is time?) I haven't checked the numbers to see if they're identical, but I was honestly a little surprised that he wasn't fully CR 30 - but he's also at the end of a dungeon that has multiple fights that seem pretty formidable.

I'm never good at just understanding how difficult an adventure is - when I'm planning my own stuff and carefully balancing encounters, I can usually get that sense, but with published adventures it's very easy to skim over "oh, that room has three Flameskulls" without really grokking that that means a barrage of Fireballs and monsters that will respawn after an hour.

I think you could complain that the adventure is somewhat fanservice-y, but I don't think they've made any effort to hide that intent.

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