I have a confession: I get nearly every D&D adventure that comes out, and I usually read about half of them and then put them on a shelf, a vague sense that I might finish them. I've definitely fully read through Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I think both Candlekeep Mysteries and Keys from the Golden Vault.
We can now add Vecna: Eve of Ruin to that list.
Now, is this a measure of quality? Certainly Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation have been some of the better-loved adventures to come out for Fifth Edition. The anthologies are, as one might expect, mixed bags (there's one Candlekeep Mystery adventure where I genuinely don't have a sense of why the players are even there in the first place).
Eve of Ruin is also notable as only the second published 5th Edition adventure that takes players to level 20 - a level cap that few games ever reach (frankly the fact that my Ravnica game is even in tier 4 feels unprecedented among any of my friends who like D&D).
So, I figured I'd make this my overall review of the adventure, not in the "thumbs up, thumbs down" sense, but more in the sense of how I think the adventure works and what you might need to tweak to make it work better. My caveat, of course, is that I'm someone who almost exclusively runs campaigns of my own design, which gives me as a DM a lot of flexibility, but also requires a lot of work.
We're also going to go into full spoiler territory here - the book has been out for only two days now, so if you plan on playing in this or even if you want to run it, but maybe discover its secrets for yourself, beware: we're going to drop some big info here, and one detail about the adventure is going to have to be discussed pretty early on.
Got it?
Ok, SPOILERS AHEAD:
This adventure starts at a higher level than I think any previous published adventure, with characters already at level 10 - the pinnacle of tier 2. The book gives some advice on creating characters whose backstories make sense for someone who has already hit level 10, but an alternative is to run adventures that take you to level 10.
Naturally, the most popular 5E adventure is Curse of Strahd, which also gets you to 10. There's a double-benefit to using this as well because when players are level 14, they will travel to Barovia, re-visiting the Death House and encountering Strahd himself.
I think this could be an awesome moment to demonstrate how utterly fucked things are in the Domains of Dread - seeing Strahd walking about fine and dandy after spending the first part of your adventuring career building to a big confrontation with him and finally defeating him. If I were to run it this way, though, I'd also make it so that Strahd doesn't remember any of the party members, perhaps not even remembering his previous defeat.
Indeed, the details of the Death House are eerily not the same as they were in Curse of Strahd - and I see this as an asset rather than a flaw, because it reinforces the weirdness of the Domains of Dread.
But that's not all: one of the most important figures in this adventure (arguably the real big bad, with Vecna serving as the "Greater Scope Villain") is Kas the Bloody-Handed, Vecna's one-time second-in-command (and based entirely on the art in one early chapter depicting Vecna and Kas before they were undead, probably way more than friends). Both of them were technically Darklords of Ravenloft way back in 2nd Edition, but while Vecna was able to escape his domain, Kas has been stuck in Tovog all this time, until the Dark Powers allowed him to leave and stop Vecna.
The Dark Powers' presence in this campaign is basically nil, but I think, especially if you were to run Curse of Strahd as the part one of this, you could do a lot to build up their influence (especially in the Amber Temple).
The initial adventure - "starter dungeon" that is of course tuned for level 10 - ends with a potential time-jump. Ironically, until the last chapters, it's the only part of the adventure that has a strong presence of Vecna worshippers and cultists. Indeed, it's kind of the only time we see anything directly related to Vecna (and not his allies or just unrelated evils) until the very end.
You could argue (and I might agree with you) that this is a flaw in an adventure that's supposed to be built around Vecna. He is a god of secrets, though - something that is reflected mechanically across the adventure - and so you could argue that it's appropriate. Still, I think having disturbing nightmares and visions would be a helpful element here.
I also think that Vecna's cult must have lots of talented spies. Here, I might make use of some of the House Dimir-associated stat blocks like Thought Spies and Mind Mages, along with undead beings like Mind-Drinker Vampires and Nightveil Spectres (also Dimir-associated) act as his eyes and ears in various locations. Just tossing in the odd NPC in each of the places across the multiverse who are secretly keeping an eye out in Vecna's name would be a cool way to seed the feelings of paranoia that seem right for this villain, and to reinforce the notion of his presence. We know that Vecna's cults across the multiverse are gathering secrets, so why should we stop seeing them after the first chapter?
After this initial dungeon, the characters eventually find themselves brought to Sigil by three legendary wizards - Alustriel Silverhand, Tasha the Witch, and Mordenkainen - only one of them is not who they seem. Kas, it turns out, has gotten his hands on a powerful artifact that is basically your license to make sure that your players cannot discover that he's impersonating Gary Gygax's onetime PC. Technically there are some oblique hints that could theoretically lead to his discovery, but the adventure is clearly written on the assumption that the players won't know this twist until the grand reveal.
Here, I think you're going to need to play close to the vest. The boring way to do this is to just make Fauxdenkainen something of a background entity. We actually get statblocks for Alustriel and Tasha, but neither is likely to actually come up in the adventure, as their big fight with Kas happens off-screen (actually, we also get Lord Soth's stats, but he doesn't appear either).
I'd be tempted to have this false Mordenkainen be more of a confidante to the party - he's basically immune to Insight checks thanks to the crown he's wearing, so you might even hint at something untrustworthy about him and hope your party's Cleric or someone else with good insight gets an amazing roll to put him beyond reproach (and this feels like something Kas might think to do, if not quite in game terms).
Levels 11 through 17 see the players going one-by-one to acquire a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, which Kas/Fauxdenkainen claims will be instrumental in stopping Vecna. The rod is certainly a powerful tool for the party in the end (and gets a huge damage bonus against Vecna in the final fight - seriously, give it to your Fighter) but ultimately Kas wants it to free his ally, Miska the Wolfspider, to fight against Vecna.
I will say that there's another potential problem in the campaign: not only are the stakes so high that failure is pretty much irrevocable (essentially you won't want to treat anything but victory as "canonical" in your campaigns... unless you homebrew a subsequent campaign to undo Vecna's victory) but it's also going to take a little cajoling to let a player create a new character if their original one dies, or just adding a new player to the mix. The reason for this is that the level 10 starting chapter creates a bond with Vecna that the players need in order to even access the small final dungeon where they fight Vecna.
Granted, we're also told that Vecna cults all over the multiverse are doing similar things that are happening in a graveyard in Neverwinter, so it might not be too difficult.
Anyway, moving forward:
The seven subsequent chapters see you going to different locations and gathering Rod pieces, each of which is a magic item in and of itself, with a few powerful spells that you can get out of them (the last piece allows you to cast Simulacrum, which is the kind of crazy power you'll want by the end of this campaign).
In each of these chapters as well, you can discover various secrets - usually it's something vaguely shameful, with a weirdly large number being abandoning or choosing not to seek out a lost friend. These become a kind of currency that can be spent during the adventure, but the more you save up before the end, the more beneficial effects you get in the fight with Vecna.
I also think these secrets are a prime candidate for homebrewing - either changing existing NPCs' secrets or adding additional ones. They are a resource, so allowing players to learn too many might make the campaign easier than intended, but I also think you can have some fun with this.
Largely, these chapters are self-contained. Other than the rod piece, nothing that happens in the Death House has anything to do with what happens in Landro, the wrecked Warforged Colossus on Eberron, and neither are related to the stuff that goes down in the Tiamat-themed casino in Avernus.
To an extent, that's fine - it's kind of the idea of the adventure that you get to go on a whirlwind tour of the D&D multiverse (though personally I think we can give the Nine Hells a bit of a rest and visit some other Outer Planes - which this adventure does!) Still, as I said before, seeding in Vecna cultists in each of these locations could be fun. And the trip to Barovia (like the Nine Hells, love Barovia as a setting, but surely we could go to some other Domains of Dread) could, as mentioned before, be pretty cool if you use this as the follow-up to Curse of Strahd.
As such, the various rod-piece adventures feel almost like an adventure anthology, each of which is largely dungeon-based (the Eberron and Krynn adventures have more stuff happening outside of their respective dungeons, but still have a decently substantial dungeon) and could probably be extracted from this story to run as its own thing, perhaps replacing the rod piece with some other McGuffin.
Now, perhaps the weirdest part of the story is chapter 18. Well, story-wise it's really just a big reveal - the party retrieves the Rod, "Mordenkainen" asks to study it and try to keep it from breaking apart again, and then while the players are having a long rest, Kas reveals himself and fights Alustriel and Tasha before stepping through a portal to Pandemonium.
While I love the image of Alustriel and Tasha chugging a dozen healing potions apiece on the former's couch, the players basically do nothing this whole chapter but still level up from 18 to 19 at the end. The book covers some contingency plans in case the players figure out Kas' duplicity, or simply act in a way that prevents him from getting the rod, but ultimately it's like "man, if he doesn't get out with that rod, you're going to need to homebrew a ton of stuff here."
The penultimate chapter is actually probably my favorite - the party will be all level 19 at this point, and they need to pursue Kas, who is located in the middle of a massive battle between the forces of Miska and the forces of Lolth (Lolth having allied with Vecna in all of this). They can drop a tower on a castle! Pandemonium is also one of my favorite outer planes (for some reason I love the "in-between" ones like this and Acheron and Arcadia).
Defeating Kas reveals the location of Vecna's ritual, which forces this confrontation, so I don't know that this part needs too much invention on the DM's part.
Finally, we've got Vecna himself. I still need to check his stats against "The Vecna Dossier" version of him, but it might be identical - which means that in place of Legendary Actions, he has multiple reactions. These can be pretty powerful, shutting down 4th and lower-level spells, for example. So, I suspect it'll be a hard fight. The Rod of Seven Parts, though, deals I think an extra 10d6 psychic damage to him when used as a +3 Quarterstaff, so that will help you shave him down.
Prior to the actual confrontation, you get some visions of "unrealities" that show the kind of multiverse he wants to make. These are, I think, not terribly challenging for a group of level 20 characters, but in terms of difficulty are there to wear down resources.
I think you could also have some fun coming up with other scenarios here - but I'd caution against doing too much with them because you don't want the players to be going in on empty against Vecna.
One of the weirdest omissions here is the Eye and Hand of Vecna - the two magic items that pre-date Vecna as a character. While these are powerful items in an adventure where the players can get their hands on some other powerful items, I feel like you've got to have them show up (frustratingly, a lot of the art for Vecna seems to forget that he's missing a hand and an eye - some give him a glowing pink/purple hand and eye that is perhaps a magical prosthesis, but it's weird). While these are not mentioned, they do throw out the idea that the players might find the Sword of Kas, though it is not in the adventure by default.
I think this could be a really fun campaign, and it doesn't seem too hard to run, especially given its fairly linear nature. I think players might be excited to get a chance to build a character that starts off at a relatively high level - allowing crazy multiclass builds that don't have those early awkward levels, or perhaps just finally getting to cast high-level spells.
I would definitely recommend you bring experienced players to an adventure like this, especially if you're starting off with fresh characters.
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