Review copy courtesy of Wizards of the Coast.
Pros
Lots of full colour art. I do think it’s a bit worse than it was closer to the start of the edition. There’s more misses, and it’s not just me complaining about the art style. But there’s lots of it. If you can, I’d recommend taking a quick skim since it could full into a lower category depending on your tastes.
A lot of different locations are visited over the course of the adventure. There’s a lot of variety of where we go and what we see.
The little extra with learning secrets is an interesting idea, and I like that it also has some mechanical elements too. I’d surely steal this if I was running my own Vecna themed adventure.
We finally have a high level adventure after a while.
The final confrontation is interesting, with some interesting mechanics inside a memory before reaching the very final point.
Could Go Either Way
Some of the choices of locations are odd? We revisit Death House again.
The villain/villain(s) are not really so present. You don’t get that introduction like you do with Strahd for example. This will be more of an issue if your players aren’t well read on D&D and the Forgotten Realms. They simply won’t know who Vecna is unless you tell them.
Vecna: Nest of the Eldritch Eye was included for pre-orders and is a pretty reasonable 3rd level adventure that helps to introduce players to Vecna and the cult. It’s a fun little thing to run for Halloween. Problem is, it’s not that widely accessible.
There are a lot of references here. To places. To characters. If you don’t have the time put into D&D, it may not hit nearly as hard.
Lot of mono-colour maps.
Cons
The overall flow of the adventure is formulaic, and is quite similar to the Planescape adventure. A series of somewhat disconnected adventures held together by a thin meta-narrative of collecting things in each place. We’ve had years now of adventures. I want to see the weird, unique, and out there stuff now.
We’ve had a long list of adventures by now. I want some more tactical encounters in these books. I’m not even asking for a lot. Give me 1-3 big set piece encounters with gimmicks, interesting tactical features, and full beautiful battlemaps.
It uses those new rules for NPC spellcasters we’ve had for a while. And wow, it really felt underwhelming against a spellcasting god like Vecna.
No PDF, though the D&D beyond version is something (it requires internet).*
* Denotes nitpicking.
 |
| The cover of Vecna Eve of Ruin. |
Introduction
It’s an important anniversary for D&D. And with it, we have this adventure. It’s meant to bring Vecna back. It’s meant to take us around various places like a “best of” and is part of D&D’s 50th anniversary. It’s meant to give players a challenge that takes them to their highest levels. Before this, most campaigns ended somewhere between level 10-12. How does it do this? Well, let’s jump right in. At the time of writing, I’ve run the first 4-5 chapters and read the whole adventure. I’ve also run and played selected parts with a different group just to get a feel for some of the big moments.
The Adventure
New Player Options
Not much here. We’ve been here before. Let’s keep going.
New Monsters
There’s a little
in the way of monsters, and we get a stat block for Vecna. It’s not
full power Vecna, but it’s something. There's 43 by my count, but as usual not all of these are new. Probably a little over half of them are new. That's not terrible at all, but it's also not a new Monster Manual.
What You Need to Play
The Monster Manual, Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide are and needed as usual. The old days of being able to run the adventure using purely the basic rules are over.
 |
| A lich on his throne. How's it look? |
The Adventure Itself
This adventure starts at level 10, but there are guidelines if you want to start at lower levels down to level 7. The adventure ends at level 20. This is very high for this edition, and I am happy to see this part of character advancement get more attention. I want to see more. The result of this is monsters are higher level, and the early levels many people don’t like (not me, I love me some level 1 play) is gone. Along with those mechanical considerations, it means the threats the party can deal with is much bigger. It’s not a small cult mostly using sticks, or a small group of goblins.
The adventure goes to many places. And I do mean that. From Barovia to Eberron, from Sigil to Oerth, a lot of ground is covered here. There’s a lot of characters too. Characters will be on speaking terms with Tasha, Mordenkainen, and Alustriel. This is interesting in theory. What happens if this is your player’s first D&D campaign? These references, and places will fall flat. This becomes a bit of a problem with Vecna himself. He doesn’t feature so prominently in the events of the story until the end directly. Sure, he’s doing stuff of screen, and he’s the reason behind the events, but we don’t see him. Personally, I’d add some sort of adventure in between that helps players get introduced to the world and some of the big name characters. There’s the other hand though. What if your players do know and like these characters? Does this adventure do them justice? Eh... that’s, a complicated question. It’s big enough that I want to do an entire article on it. That I am not emphatically declares yes though is worrisome.
There is an adventure only available to pre-order customers. It’s an alright classic dungeon exploration sort of thing. But it really is too bad it wasn’t more widely available. Combining that with some custom adventures to get players hooked would really go a long way. And if I was running it for a group of D&D newbies, it’s what I’d do. Here’s an idea for Wizards: make an adventure going levels 1-10 that can get players antiquated with the cult of Vecna and the big players.
The structure of the adventure is...not my favourite. A series of mostly disconnected chapters held together by a meta-plot about obtaining pieces of something is fine. It can be fun. But we just had that with the Planescape adventure. There we collected memories instead of items, but the same structure is present. It allows players to set their path and where they want to go next while they check off each location. But in D&D, adventures often take that away too since different areas are intended for different levels. This adventure should really have been something different. Something more narrative focused, where each part interacts with the next tightly. Something more like Curse of Strahd. We need variety. Quests from the Infinite Staircase is similar in this regard, but I make an exception for anthologies (quick preview, I actually quite liked that book). For those, the book could be sold with no glue holding the adventures together. An example for this glue really helps, and I can easily ignore it if I hate it.
The encounters themselves are very similar to what we had before. And honestly, I want to see more here going forward. I want at least a few encounters in every book to be special. With interesting gimmicks and tactical considerations. The fights my players remember are not when they stood static in a blank room rolling dice until the other side fell down. They were racing against another group to get to a switch while exchanging fire. They were trying to use features of the environment for an advantage. The enemy goblins were falling back over a rope bridge and getting ready to cut it, as the party chased after them. The rogue was breaking into the vault while the rest held off the incoming security, before making an escape from rooftop to rooftop. The party was trying to interrupt a ritual, and how well they did affected the strength of the summoned creature. This would require a map for an encounter, rather than an entire dungeon. But I think the way it pays off is worth it.
This is kind of where I contradict the above complaint a bit. The final conflict had an interesting gimmick where players went through different versions of possible futures if Vecna succeeds. They then escape it, and go into the next one before finally reaching Vecna. This is interesting, and it actually helps introduce the players to Vecna and what he’s all about. The reason my above critique is still valid though is because when the players finally reach him in the end, the tactical considerations from the location itself weren’t present. Sure, they still had their class features. But I want this fight to be unique. What they did do is have a mechanic where players collect secrets and can trade these collected secrets for mechanical benefit, including at the end. This is good. I like it a lot. But I’d like just a little more to really make this combat special.
Part of this is made worse due to those simplified rules for NPC casters. If Vecna had a full spell list like the lich did in the original Monster Manual, it’d be a bit better. Worse, it’s still hard to even convert them to the older style. Please, just give us spell caster levels on the stat block at least so I can do it myself. Better yet, just support the old version too. I like having the option. If I had players break into a necromancer cult, I’d probably use the old rules for the leader and simplified for the apprentices. But it should be MY choice to make.
There are some decently interesting things here. Some of these chapters would make excellent asides of the basis for arcs of your campaign. The start of the adventure I would say is quite strong in terms of the narrative it sets up. I wish the overall plot had more effort put into it. I wish some more effort was put into encounters. I think this is one of those adventures that needs a lot of effort by the Dungeon Master to make it good. I predict that a lot of groups will find it “just ok” enough to be annoying. We don’t want ok or bad. We want great. And we’ve had some excellent content in this edition. We’ve had good but needs serious cleanup by the Dungeon Master to make it great. And some are highly flawed. I think this one is flawed.
What Would I Like For a D&D Anniversary?
If I were to sit down and try to write an adventure for a D&D anniversary, I’d want everything. I’d want large scale battles. I’d want low scale tactical combat. I’d want a strong narrative flow through the whole adventure. I’d want famous characters and villains in their mighty splendour. How about lots of space for players to run around, explore, and investigate?
.png "Vecna Eye of Ruin Environment Art") |
| One of the environment pieces. |
The Art and Book Build Quality
My book was good in terms of physical condition. There was no issues with the binding. I had no stuck pages, no issues with pages being cut. It was to the physical quality I expected. The art was plentiful throughout the book and the colouring was what I expected. I’m happy to see some of the issues I’ve seen in the past were avoided.
How about the art itself? Well, there’s some really good art. The art relating to the Eberron section was stuff I liked. Seeing ruined machines of war, broken and rusting littering the landscape. It makes for good art, and a good setting. There’s also some eh art as well. As always, I want to see some more realistic scenery art. If one day they make an adventure with all of the main adventure scenes and rooms done in beautiful realistic style, I’ll be very happy. The maps are varied in style, and nice as well. There’s some with colour. There’s some monochromatic ones too. But they’re easy to read and understand. In general, it’s solid, but I find myself thinking there hit to miss ratio is worse compared to earlier books in this edition.
Price
It’s the usual price we’ve come to expect. I wish they were longer or cheaper, but that’s what we deal with now.
What I felt was Missing
One day, I hope people get a digital version with their physical release. It doesn’t cost that much more, so it’d be a great bonus. I also hope one day we do get real PDFs. So we can access the books digitally with no restriction or DRM what-so-ever.
There's a lot of encounters I would've liked to see, especially given the fact it's an anniversary and the books are getting pricier.
 |
| Vecna and Kas fighting each other. |
Summary
It’s an alright adventure with some interesting ideas and locations. But it also has some very serious flaws that are non-trivial to fix. It can be broken up for parts easily and reused by the resourceful Dungeon Master. It really is like a loose collection of adventure tied together by an overarching narrative. The adventure itself is a mixed bag in many ways for me though. That overching plot is a bit thin and messy. For something like this, bringing such big classic characters together, I want a strong plot with strong characters and strong characterizing of the villains. It’s Vecna. I want it to be legendary. In such an adventure, it’s important to do justice to such important characters when you bring them out. We also have a lot of adventures published in this edition to compete with. If I were to sit down and run a game for someone who has been gone from D&D for a while as a celebration of 50 years of D&D in 5th edition, it would be Curse of Strahd. Being alright is not enough, because people want to run good adventures, and we have a lot of choice now. The adventure needs to be special, especially as prices rise. What’s frustrating about adventures like this is they could’ve been great. I play tabletop role-playing games to experience great.
