VECNA: Eve of Ruined?

What's going on with Vecna Eve of Ruin? Our Black Obelisk conspiracy comes to a close with a spectacular thud.

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Dragon Magazine 338
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#Jorphdan #DnD #Vecna

[MoonGoblin]

WotC has that Middass touch where everything they touch deadass becomes mid 😭

[sentientwaffle]

Maybe we should just go back to modules.

[ILoveEvadingTax]

You're telling me they had a chance to weave together every little nugget of mystery from all the adventures, INCLUDING BG3 and they fucking squandered it all?

[PondStibbons]

To those saying you can modify the adventure to tie in, or to make sense, or to be fun: Sure, but it's like going to a restaurant, ordering a burger, then finding the meat is pretty much just raw when it's given to you. Then when you complain, you're told that you could just go home, put it on the grill, and cook it yourself. Sure, that's possible, but if you're doing that then why on Toril did you come to a restaurant and pay them to cook it for you? Same with the book. This is supposed to be the very best that D&D can be, the big 50th anniversary celebration, but it's raw. It's bad. We can do better than them, but we're just some random players, and they're the huge company. This is not acceptable.

[TheDriftingCatman]

Chekhov's gun remains on the mantle above the fire place!😓

[LordZeebee]

The easy fix would just be to have a shattered obelisk stand in the Sanctum, each shard taking you to each world, and have the adventure be about the party searching for both the shards and the rod. Vecna is truely unstoppable, his spell has already started taking effect when you reach him and the only way to defeat him is to take control of the obelisks he's aquired and use them all together to reset the multiverse

[antonwblake]

Just goes to show, when a corporation puts a stranglehold on their creatives, forces them to split their time between a big final adventure and a new edition, and then fires a large amount of those same creatives just before the crucial final months of completing that adventure, you're not going to get something that is worth the cover price.

[clute]

I 100% agree. Without going into any spoiler territory, I was expecting more out of this book and due to it's lackluster production I am forced to do too much heavy lifting as a DM. The entire adventure is lazily written (which may be more of a producer input such as limitation of pages, inclusion of specific characters and plot hooks or miscommunication between teams rather than a set of bad writers), full of "convenient" and uninspiring objectives, raillroaded campaign style and unfaithful to prior published lore. Much like WOTC 5e Dragonlance, Spelljammer and Planescape I feel like what was promised and hyped was not what was delivered and that in order to get the campaign I am running for my players to resemble anything that was hyped.... I am going to have to pour so much time that I would have been better off writing it from scratch.

[jamesyoung]

Eve of Ruin is supposed to a cash grab capitalizing on D&D's 50th, Veca's popularity from Stranger Things, and any remaining good will and nostalgia from fans. Remember they've openly said on many occasions they don't playtest AT ALL anything from the higher levels, I think level 12+.

[OhThatRobin]

I wonder if this is because they fired so many people that the ones who knew what the heck to do with the obelisks no longer work there. Heck, I don’t think many of the people who can write good adventures are there anymore. Even as a huge fan of D&D 5e I have to admit the content has been suffering lately. No wonder Larian stopped working with them, the ones behind the magic are all gone now. It’s up to us the players and DMs to make a good Eve of Ruin.

[ThiagoCCosta]

The biggest mistake of every dnd and magic player is to trust in wotc.

[maniacmagge]

Jorphdan and countless other DMs about to have their thanos "fine... I'll do it myself" moment

[Ironcaster]

Too many cooks in the kitchen working on these adventures.

[TrueEpicCereal]

Imagine if all the 5e adventures built up multiple high level parties and then those parties converged in this book. Your players (assuming you ran everything with the same group) could swap between different high level characters in different locations all fighting towards the same goal. Enemies could be extremely deadly and over powered, maybe some even unkillable, all because you already have other characters built and ready to go.

Just think about how epic it would be having 4 or 5 parties of 4 or 5 players coming together after being brutally beaten, just barely retrieving all the pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts, and the whole table realizes it's all finally been worth it. They can now defeat Vecna...

Maybe have that Avenger's moment at the end when half your epic-leveled characters have died, after defeating Vecna the remaining characters activate the obelisks and bring everyone back.

I feel like it's a no brainer, but I guess things like that don't sell in the eyes of the higher ups. Personally, coming up with this idea makes me actually interested in getting all the books and running it like this. Maybe I will!

[robertblank]

You're very close here to what I consider to be the central mystery of the obelisks and the spellweavers that I've been chasing for years now with fascination. My big difference from your interpretation is that when the spellweavers talk about the multiverse (or Dak'kon's codex in Planescape Torment talk about the False Realities), I think they're talking about the shattered prism cosmology established in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons. They want to take all our different campaigns, the various novels, the cartoons, the movies, all the video games--every splinter reality created during the great primal war that involved Bahamut and Tiamat at the dawn of creation and reweave it together back into a single reality a gain--a True Reality. I think Vecna found out about that plan and did as much as he could to subvert it to be able to create a universe in his image. Is that what happened when 2e got remade in Die Vecna Die and turned into 3e? Is it the same thing another incarnation of Vecna did in Critical Role? Is he constantly testing the fences like a velociraptor in different realities until he eventually wins and gets his way? I think that might actually be Vecna's whole deal. Maybe the destruction of the original Spellweaver civilization, when they first tried to mend the cosmic prism of multiverses--maybe Vecna was there too. Is the central conflict of the multiverse of D&D just a chess game between Vecna and the shattered spellweaver civilization with forces like Mordenkainen trying to prevent either side from winning? It certainly would be interesting.

[madjarov]

I too thought this would be a "reset" that ushers in the new editio... vers... rebrand? of D&D. Oh well.

Doomed Forgotten Realms (which my man here has reviewed), specifically the Rise & Fall of Vecna, is a great Vecna-based alternative. And it's cheaper. I've run parts of it and it's been great. I especially love that he's taken over Waterdeep and used the Walking Statues, which have so far been treated as window dressing in 5e (IYKYK). Also there's a part where the PCs explore the inside of, and command, a gargantuan mechanical Fire Giant (basically a Warforged Titan).

[CJenkerson]

I can’t wait to see a Jorphdan fix to this adventure.

[Witchgirl]

I used to listen to the dragon talk podcasts and I swear I remember Chris Perkins talking about the black obelisks and their connection to vecna while being coy so I’m shocked that wizards didn’t use them in this adventure

[HoobtheNoob]

I honestly don't know who these mythical groups are that run every single published hard cover adventure running a single one to completion is a monumental task

[WouldbeSage]

I want to visit the world where Hasbro cherishes the WoTC creative team and takes their input very seriously, and carefully manages the cohesiveness of their product like Kevin Feige with the MCU.