Vecna: Eve of Ruin Review
One of WotC's stronger releases at times, but deeply frustrating in others
I have wanted to start a site where I write about D&D and other TTRPG topics at length for a while. Nothing gets those juices flowing like the release of a new product, so let's take a look at Vecna: Eve of Ruin. This post is considerably longer than others will be, because I wanted to dig in to what it would be like to play or run this campaign.
I bought the book two weeks ago at my local game store. Now that it’s available for everyone, I thought it would be a good time to give a review.
Strengths: This may be the easiest full-length adventure for a DM to prepare in 5th Edition. Players and DMs who have never played a level 10-20 adventure before should feel comfortable with most of the content, not overwhelmed by high level shenanigans. Most chapters go to a different setting; it's the proper amount of time to spend there without overstaying your welcome.
Weaknesses: Many chapters are a combat slog with no rest opportunities to let players keep using high-level abilities. Noncombat challenges feel heavily skewed towards a few classes. Several boss fights at the end of chapters can ruin players’ experience, echoing some of the largest complaints from Phandelver and Below about taking away players' turns.
Who This Book Is For: Groups who want to travel the multiverse. Groups who like dungeon crawls.
Who This Book Isn’t For: Groups who want a heavy focus on Vecna’s cult and nothing but Vecna. Groups who hear about the power of secrets in the introduction and expect an intrigue campaign.
Overall, reading this book felt like a roller coaster ride. Its strengths are about as strong as any WotC 5th Edition adventure. However, its weaknesses feel as extreme as any 5th Edition adventure. Others have written their reviews of this book already; it’s easy to dwell on the weaknesses and forget the strengths.
So you know where I’m coming from, I always expect to make modifications to published adventures to fit my players and my preferences as a DM. Published adventures can give a good building block for running my weekly game, even if I make wholesale changes. My last campaign started as a level 6-9 version of Lost Mine of Phandelver.
Touring the Multiverse
At the beginning of the adventure, the party must confront Vecna cultists in Neverwinter and becomes aware of his ritual to try and remake the universe. To stop it, they go to seven different settings to try and get different parts of the Rod of Seven Parts. Each chapter involves going to a particular location and a particular dungeon thematic to that plane.
Some groups will like going from setting to setting, at least if they feel like the setting was portrayed in a way they enjoy. (The Underdark feels well done, but I randomly flipped through the Dragonlance chapter back to front and didn't guess it was Krynn.) Others will wish they had more time in a particular area, either to get the feel of the lace or establish recurring NPCs the party cares about. While Sigil serves as a home base in between going to various worlds, the party never spends a minute in town or meets an NPC in Sigil besides the three famous wizards who summon them to Sigil.
Unfortunately, part of making each of these chapters true to the setting where it takes place is that Vecna and his cult barely make an appearance in the book. They show up in the first chapter, but then Vecna is off conducting his ritual until the final chapter. It reminds me of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden where Auril is removed from most of the adventure conducting her ritual. This book feels more like a travelogue of the Multiverse than a Vecna book.
Setting expectations is critical, because some players would prefer a travelogue while others would favor a heavy focus on Vecna. I'd expect many players to want it both ways and be disappointed because of unrealistic expectations. If everyone in your group is happy with hopping through the multiverse, this book could be lots of fun for you. If you want more Vecna or a deeper connection to a particular setting than a single episode, this book will likely disappoint.
Familiar Dungeon Feel
For most of the book, characters go to a particular thematic dungeon in a particular setting to find a piece of the Rod of Seven Parts. Dungeons are between 20-40 rooms, so each probably takes 2-3 four hour play sessions. That's fairly common for most WotC books, although it feels a bit old school as more recent WotC adventure books have been less wedded to dungeons.
Easier On The DM
One of the things that strikes me skimming through the various chapters of Vecna: Eve of Ruin is how straight-forward most of it is to prepare as a DM. There are monsters in this room. There's a trap in that room that requires a specific saving throw and has one way to deactivate.
Few rooms have encounters that are connected to each other, like needing to pull a switch in one part of the dungeon to open a door in a different part of the dungeon. There’s rarely an NPC listed in the beginning of the dungeon who might appear in different rooms at different times for the DM to keep track of.
Because each chapter is self-contained with less than a handful of NPCs appearing in multiple chapters, there's far less need for a DM to read in advance than most full length WotC adventures. I feel like I could run one of these chapters tomorrow if I had to and wanted to just run as written.
No Expertise in High Level Play Required
Similarly, this book's challenges feel like they are written for players who have never played high level characters before and aren't familiar with high level abilities or spells. This is a wise decision. Combats don’t require players to think of the intricacies of how a lich would wait for the right moment to cast wall of force, splitting the party in opposite sides of a room.
Of course, players who are more experiences with high level play and certain forms of optimization will feel disappointed by this. You can’t satisfy everyone. (I’ll have plenty of suggestions for optimizers as this blog experiment goes on.)
Combat Heavy Chapters
Some chapters emphasize lots fo fighting. By my count, the first dungeon has nine required combat encounters. The Krynn chapter has ten combats if the characters go through all the rooms in the main floor of the dungeon, plus one to three at the top floor (fighting could easily move from one room to another and become a bigger brawl).
For the most part, these combats are what you’d expect from prior WotC hardcovers. There are a few monsters in a room. None of them are particularly hard except for some bosses at the end of a dungeon; the point seems to be a war of attrition.
Where Are The Rests?
Most if not all of these chapter-length dungeons are written with the implicit understanding that there's no place to take any sort of a rest in a dungeon full of enemies. One might think that high level adventurers don't need rests.
However, as 5th Edition has progressed, many have moved away from the Dungeon Master's Guide idea of six encounters per adventuring day ad wars of attrition in favor of a smaller number of encounters. Players want to use their biggest spells or abilities more than once every six fights! At higher levels combat often takes longer, so players may only get to use their cool new high level abilities every 2-3 sessions if running these dungeons as written. It would be awful to play a warlock in these dungeons and never get a short rest. (My first time playing a full length WotC hardcover was Tomb of Annihilation. Our DM modified the tomb for deadlier fights and more long rests but never gave my warlock a short rest so I’m forever opposed to this way of running a dungeon now.)
Part of why I wish there were more long rests built into chapters is that learning high level spells for the first time don't get many opportunities to try out those new spells and figure out which ones they like.
If you are like me and would want to give your players rests, you will need to create ways to get their players rests to keep combat-heavy chapters like this from becoming a horrible slog. I'd modify a room or two in each of these long dungeons with a turncoat who is willing to help the party under the right conditions, adding elements of social interaction and intrigue to break up the fights while giving mechanical rests so players can keep using their abilities.
Non-Combat Emphasizes Dungeoneering
Certain skills come up over and over for dungeon crawling (it's hardly a surprise what they are). There's no attempt to include unconventional skills as alternatives in the dungeon crawling to let other members of the party contribute.
All of the easy to prepare design means the solution to just about every challenge is expected to be on the players' character sheets. There’s no creatively doing things in one room to unlock another. If players don't have the right abilities and/or try to improvise an alternate solution, the DM has to be ready to improvise a solution with no help from the adventure. It's the opposite of other books which may present novel puzzles that stump players who want to roll for a solution.
I found this particularly frustrating because other reviews led me to believe that if I was playing this adventure, I should bring my level 10 Bard/Warlock Ellywick (they/them pronouns). They are a tourist of Faerûn in an elaborate modron costume who keeps adventuring and helping others as a way to pay for their next journey. Under all the disguises, Ellywick has the Mask of Many Faces Invocation and Actor feat while holding their own in combat. They'd be perfect for a travelogue adventure with a dash of intrigue.
However, there isn't much call for a bard emphasizing more traditional bard skills in all of these dungeons as compared to a rogue, wizard, or maybe a cleric. Ellywick would feel like a star in the more roleplay heavy Spelljammer chapter, but oftentimes I would feel like I should have picked a different character because of the book's imbalanced challenges.
As a sidenote, there is a major intrigue section of the plot that others who have reviewed the length have focused on. Since reviewing it would be impossible without spoilers, I'm going to address it in a separate post where I talk about intrigue plots .
Starting At Level 10, Or...
One of the better decisions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin is to provide some options for players to start the adventure at level 7, 8, 9, or 11 instead of level 10. If players have played a character since level 1, playing for six months to a year or more, they have probably grown attached to that character. You don't want to tell players "sorry, your character has grown to level 11, they are too tall for this ride." It's not perfect because many WotC hardcovers go to level 12, but a smart DM could just make some adjustments to make fights harder and start at level 12. Hopefully a DM who has DMed a full campaign to get characters that high has realized they don't need to follow the book word for word.
If your players have played for a while, they may have multiple characters of an appropriate level for starting this adventure. In that case, I strongly recommend talking to your players about what kinds of things their characters will be doing on a session-by-session basis and the book's emphasis on dungeon crawling. Playing my bard/warlock Ellywick would be frustrating for much of the adventure, because I'd know my barbarian/rogue Lady Lucinda would be more fun to play. She's got similar roleplay of wanting to travel the world, in her case to secure trade rights with her burgeoning goblin kingdom. However, her Expertise with Perception and proficiency in thieves' tools would be a better fit than Ellywick's unique skills.
DMs will want to make sure incoming characters have similar levels of magic items that they obtained upon reaching level 10, both in terms of power and quantity. The book does not give any guidance or recommendations regarding what is "appropriate" and it's better to leave this to individual DMs.
Scarcity of Magic Items
When the characters start going to different worlds or planes to chase down the Rod of Seven Parts, each is offered a Rare magic item . However, there are relatively few magic items in the rest of the adventure. There are no +3 weapons and few Very Rare or Legendary magic items. There are fewer items and less powerful magic items than most WotC adventures.
On the one hand, I can understand why designers may not have wanted to include many magic items. The published list of items in a WotC book is often the minimum that DMs reward, and I have met many DMs who don't want to DM an item heavy game. For example, here's Gerald, a level 20 character I may play at an upcoming convention: He's got a belt of storm giant strength, staff of power, shield +3, plate +1, blessing of protection for 27 Armor Class, and more. Gerald's items are hardly out of line for this convention, but there's a reason many convention DMs want no part of level 17-20 DMing.
On the other hand, when a WotC book gives out so few magic items, they set a normative standard that even level 20 games shouldn't be played with many magic items. When are most players going to get a chance to play around with those powerful very rare items? It's the first time in years WotC published a level 20 adventure.
Why not let players use magic items appropriate to level 20? Gerald has five magic items that are more powerful by just about any definition than anything awarded in this book. Adding these five items or five similar items and divvying them among the party is more than reasonable. Many WotC hardcovers have a staff of power or carpet of flying already.
The lack of magic items is particularly galling for two reasons. First, I decided of all my level 8-10 characters I'd play with Lady Lucinda. She's already got a sun blade, which is better than any weapon she'd get in the entire campaign going to level 20? Not including better magic weapons is a design bias against martial characters, who need them as spellcasters get 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells.
Second, at the end of the adventure Vecna is clearly close to altering the multiverse in his image. The party is in Sigil, one of the wealthiest places in the multiverse. Telling them "sorry, we need you to save the multiverse but won't give you the tools to do it" isn't exactly a good fantasy. Players should have been able to go on a wild shopping spree before the last chapter to have a few sessions using those incredibly rare items along with seeding Very Rare items throughout the adventure.
Frustrating New Monsters
One of my ENnie nominations is for Best Monster / Adversary design as part of the team for Archvillain Archive. Eventually I want to focus a good portion of this site on monster and encounter design, so I would be remiss not to talk about some of the Vecna book's new monsters here.
For now, I will start by focusing on the False Lich's recharge ability. This boss monster can force all creatures within 30 feet of it to make a DC 22 Wisdom saving throw against fear or be knocked unconscious for a minute, with the chance to repeat the save and end the effect at the end of your turn. This is particularly nasty. It's not like a sleep spell where damage wakes you up. Lesser restoration, greater restoration, and even heal don't end the unconscious or frightened condition. Heroism makes you immune to the frightened condition but won't specifically remove it if you are already frightened, so DMs may have different interpretations. A 10th level paladin is immune to the fear and can walk around removing it from the party (subject to the same DM discretion as the heroism spell). Other parties will need players to roll high enough to break the effect if they want to participate in combat instead of just watch.
Let's see how our heroes Lady Lucinda (+6 with Resilient: Wisdom) and Ellywick +1) could shake off the unconscious condition during this fight:
Ellywick has no chance of making the saving throw and is unconscious all fight if hit with this ability.
Lucinda has a 25% chance of making the saving throw. She’s got a 43.75% chance of only losing one turn. However, that means the most likely scenario is that she’d lose two or more turns, at which point we’d expect the false lich to recharge this ability and lock Lucinda down again.
Even Sariel, a Druid with 22 Wisdom due to a tome of understanding, only has a 50 percent chance of making this saving throw.
I'm not doing this to players at my table. Period. I'm happy to restrain them or impose other conditions, but try to imagine what it would be like to play Ellywick and realize "I'm never going to get another turn." I’m enough of a veteran optimizer to know Ellywick would have a huge weakness towards this type of ability and not play them beyond level 10 at any table that embraced these types of high level challenges. What’s going to happen to a new player who doesn’t expect something like this as a posisbility?
Later on, there's a boss monster with a similar effect, but it's a DC 23 Constitution saving throw that stuns for a turn on a failure. If this was the boss' only way to take away turns, this would be tolerable. I have used ancient sapphire dragons as bosses before and their breath weapon does the same thing. However, this later boss can also cast a DC 23 hypnotic pattern twice per day, including as a Legendary Action. After the first PC goes, the party is clumped near the door. The boss can immediately hit them with a hypnotic pattern to knock them all unconscious unless they get lucky rolls?
When I imagine the type of player who would like most of Vecna: Eve of Ruin as written, I imagine the type of player whose character is likely to be wrecked by these abilities unless they are a cleric, druid, or extremely lucky. There’s no better way to sum up this book. It’s great (for some) until it takes a sudden turn off a cliff and into a pit of despair.