Stranger Things season 4 is invoking one of D&D’s most powerful villains
polygon.comThe first official trailer for Stranger Things season 4 dropped on Tuesday, to the delight of diehard fans. Suddenly all the drips and drabs of information delivered by Netflix, over the past few years, started to make sense. Oddly enough, the biggest piece of the puzzle was actually released late last year, in the form of season 4’s episode list. And it invokes the name of one of Dungeons & Dragons most storied villains: the sorcerer turned god known only as Vecna.
Tuesday’s trailer seems to point to a mysterious, malevolent force that has been sitting behind the scenes in Hawkins Indiana all along. At the bottom of that theoretical pyramid of power are the dog-like demogorgons from seasons 1 and 2. Those, in turn, are controlled by the massive and powerful mind flayer from season 3. Sitting above them all is another, unnamed entity given voice for the first time in this new trailer.
“You’ve broken everything,” laments the voice. “Your suffering is almost at an end.” Cut to a rotting corpse, held together by filaments of gore and lit by an angry red flash. “You have lost,” it concludes.
Add in the fact that season 4, episode 2 is titled “Vecna’s Curse” and we’ve pretty much found season 4’s big bad.
Vecna was a sorcerer who turned himself into an undead abomination known as a lich only to eventually ascend to godhood. He was first introduced to D&D way back in 1976 with the publication of Dungeons & Dragons Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry, written by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume. As historian Shannon Applecline indicates in his product history at DriveThruRPG, his addition to the D&D canon was likely the work of Blume alone. Also of note is the fact that Vecna is an anagram for Jack Vance, a science fiction and fantasy
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