Vecna: Eve of Ruin is the dessert course for those who’ve feasted on D&D’s best campaigns
Over the last decade, Wizards of the Coast has rolled out a series of elaborate campaign books for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, each one customized for low-to-mid-level characters. At most, those products have topped out at around level 13, leaving fans to make their own way toward the game’s level 20 cap.
Next month, the publisher is raising the stakes with Vecna: Eve of Ruin, an adventure that begins at level 10 and goes to level 20. But it’s more than just a series of high-level encounters. It’s a celebration of everything that’s come before, and the opportunity for the franchise’s most dedicated fans to run a well-earned victory lap.
In a recent briefing, Wizards shared a few highlights from Eve of Ruin. The whirlwind tour included a surprising amount of spoilers, but before we get anywhere close to those, let’s first discuss the broad strokes.
Stranger Thingsfans’ ears likely perked up when they saw that players would be taking on Vecna, but they should temper their enthusiasm a bit. Wizards isn’t sneaking in a way to crack Max out of the intensive care unit in Hawkins, Indiana. That’s Netflix’s problem. Instead, it’s reintroducing the original Vecna, a powerful undead villain from Dungeons & Dragons lore.
“The first mention of Vecna dates all the way back to 1976,” said senior game designer Amanda Hamon, referring to Eldritch Wizardry, a supplement for first edition D&D that Brian Blume wrote with the game’s co-creator, Gary Gygax. “[Blume] mentions the Hand and the Eye of Vecna as artifacts. There’s only one line about Vecna himself: It says he’s a lich of great power and evil [...] who can only affect people who have put on his hand and his eye.”
Hamon added that, allegedly, not even Gygax himself knew anything more about the lich that Blume had added. It was one of those open-ended bits of lore that was purposefully added at the margins so that at-home players had jumping-off points for their own adventures. And it was largely through the work of
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