Wednesday, May 22, 2024

More Impressions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin

 I've read quite a bit into the latest 5E adventure, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

 As mentioned before, the adventure has an episodic structure that is essentially a dungeon for every level as you go from 10 to 20. Transportation between these dungeons is relatively quick and easy - your home base is in Sigil, and there's a little bending of the rules (though easily justified) to allow you to pop from one location to the next.

As with a lot of published adventures, DMs are going to need to really consider some of the details between the details to make this a fun and memorable voyage.

It's very cool to go to all these established settings (most on the Material Plane, but there are forays into the Shadowfell via Ravenloft and I'm just starting a part that takes place in the Nine Hells) but the risk, I think, of having players pop up usually right at the front door to these dungeons is that they might feel disconnected from their broader worlds.

This is always a challenge - no campaign can fully encapsulate a world (though with the relatively light detail Ravnica gets, I think I've gotten a lot out of it in my 4+ year campaign). I do think that the Forgotten Realms chapters and the Greyhawk one could kinda sorta fit into nearly any world, but Eberron's feels very much of its setting (it takes place in the Mournlands and the dungeon is a giant Warforged Colossus) while the Ravenloft one actually takes you into a dungeon many players have already been to - Barovia's Death House (which serves as the optional starter dungeon in Curse of Strahd if you want players starting at level 1 instead of 3) but this time you're getting there at level 14, thus with much more serious threats.

Still, the links that take you from one chapter to the next are pretty obvious for the players, so even though you have this home base in Sigil, for most of the adventure not a lot happens there.

To be fair: there is plenty of stuff to do here. It's easy as a DM to always fill in stuff between the stuff you want to get to, but this can expand your campaign to take a very long time. If you want to be sure you can get through this whole thing, you might consider just running it as written.

Still, I think I'd be tempted to make use of the "not quite in the dungeon" parts of certain chapters to have some fun - for example, there's a little exploring to do in the Mournlands before you find the actual Colossus with the artifact you're looking for, and the Krynn section has a few lead-up quests before you actually reach the big dungeon. These seem like places you could expand into.

Confession: other than a single dubiously-legal Adventurer's League module, I've never run an adventure I didn't come up with myself. So take everything I say here with a grain of salt. But in those published adventures that I've played (or seen played - my best friend has a streaming show where they're in theory going to run through all the published adventures, though they're only finishing up Lost Mines of Phandelver after like a year, so don't hold your breath for them to get to this one) I've always appreciated when DMs add or alter adventures to play into player character backstories and the like.

Given how world-hopping this one is, I'd definitely encourage players to consider making characters from very diverse backgrounds - not just those from the Forgotten Realms - and thread in personal quests to this overall challenge.

One element that's a little surprising is that Vecna, as a presence, is not seen or heard of very much. Local heavies, like Strahd, the Lord of Blades, Lord Soth, or Acererak pop up as thematic figures (though of these you only directly interact with and fight Strahd). Now, the guy is the Whispered One, and so I think it's reasonable to imagine that he'd be pretty good at keeping out of the spotlight. But I think it'd be important to periodically remind the players who the real villain is here.

Vecna, after all, is effectively D&D's biggest bad. While I don't think presenting him as a big enough threat to make some of the game's other major villains want to team up with the party is quite the way to go, I think it would be cool to kind of see how even legends like Strahd and Lord Soth are small potatoes compared to him.

You don't want Vecna showing up constantly like a cartoon villain, but having a sense of paranoia that his spies are everywhere could be fun.

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