I’ve had a chance to read through some of Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the new campaign adventure from Wizards of the Coast that takes characters from levels 10 through to level 20.
My initial impressions are cautiously positive. I’m going to refrain from spoilers here for the most part, except for a few things that I believe are generally known. If you want to be entirely unspoilt, here’s your chance to stop reading!
I intend to start DMing this adventure next Monday.
Structurally, this is a linear adventure. For the most part, each chapter takes you to a new plane where you need to get the next thing for your quest. This allows the party to visit many of the most popular settings for this edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It does not, however, include any of the Magic: the Gathering settings.
The success at evoking each of these settings vary. It will surprise few that I consider their treatment of Dragonlance to be absolute garbage. Let’s make it all about something that Dragonlance has never been known for, and sideline about everything Dragonlance is known for. This part of the adventure isn’t that bad, but it’s in the wrong fucking setting.
However, despite all my misgivings about where they were setting the Ravenloft component, they came up with an absolutely brilliant idea for it. No idea how it will run, but it looks promising and I look forward to seeing my players’ reactions.
Eberron also seems to be handled well.
The overall storyline works for me. It is fraught with failure points, however. The most impressive failure point comes with the adventure’s solution being “Just level the characters up to level 18 (from 11) and continue from a later part of the adventure.” Otherwise being “skip most of the adventure”. I think there are other ways around this situation, so I’ll do something different if the worst case occurs, but that so-called solution is hilariously bad.
Of note, the much-hyped Obelisks do not even rate a mention in this adventure. Guess The Shattered Obelisk, that underwhelming experience, was their high point. What a disappointment!
As I said, these are my first impressions of a partial readthrough of the adventure. I’ve read the summary, the first couple of chapters, and then bounced around to particular stuff that interests me. I’m cautiously optimistic that it will play well, though I’ll probably have to be on my toes as a DM! Thankfully, I have agreeable players who are unlikely to sabotage the experience!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I’m very interested in how your impressions evolve. I’m currently running Shattered Obelisk and share a lot of the disappointments you have listed.
Basing the entire Dragonlance section on werewolves is such an insane headscratcher of a decision. I do *like* that they tried to come up with unique twists on werewolves for the setting, like deathwolves tied to the red moon, but like… why? Why make the central theme in the Dragonlance section something that, traditionally, doesn’t exist in Dragonlance? You didn’t have to do that? At all? It’s… bizarre.
My biggest fear about Eve of Ruin – which seems decent enough from my flip-through of my digital copy – is that it seems to be the same team that produced Shattered Obelisk. God hopes that WotC maybe put a bit more effort into the editing process on their big 50th anniversary adventure.
From my brief look through, it seems like an adventure similar to Tyranny of Dragons — not in scope or ambition, but in the sense that a DM that knows the lore of all these things already can expand the skeleton of the book out in entertaining ways for their groups, but someone less familiar will find it a less rewarding experience.
It *is* strange to me that the obelisks don’t show up at all. Given that the lore given for them in past adventures sort of bent over backwards to make them a Vecna thing while *also* making them a spellweaver thing *and* a Netherese thing at the same time, and their reality re-writing properties would seem to make sense for what Vecna’s trying to do in this story. I know a lot of people speculated that even in defeating Vecna the obelisks would still be used to rewrite reality to justify whatever retcons WotC wants to make to the lore in not-6E.
As it stands, all the adventures the obelisks *do* appear in are Forgotten Realms adventures, so they could have just been Netherese, but the convoluted connections to the weavers and Vecna seemed to be so that WotC could place them anywhere. I wonder if at one point in development the Maguffin in each setting was an obelisk instead of a Rod part?
The Rod’s involvement seemed really random to me when the first information about this campaign was coming out (like, wrong villain guys), so I was actually pretty impressed when I read the adventure and saw how it’s being used.
Meanwhile, I wonder if WotC feels like they no longer need in-narrative justifications for retcons anymore, given how retcon happy they’ve been in books like Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, Phandelver & Below, etc.