Vecna, Here I Come!

After playing through Nest of the Eldritch Eye, my D&D party starts Vecna: Eve of Ruin tonight. Using 2024 rules! Kinda.

Tonight, I start the first session of my Vecna: Eve of Ruin campaign with one of my weekly groups. It's an online group that's met for over 3 years now on a weekly(ish) basis. We have alternated DMing responsibilities, but they wanted me to run this one.

We did the prologue adventure, Nest of the Eldritch Eye, so this isn't technically the first session since they have characters that already exist in the world, work for Lord Neverember, and have a little experience with the Cult of Vecna.

I'm placing the main adventure 5 years after the prologue since they're moving from 3rd level to 10th. I think that's a good amount of time to let things fester and then have a bit of a history with each other and the city itself.

2024 or Bust

I am also going to be trying out the 2024 rules from the PHB I was lucky enough to get at Gen Con. I did that earlier this week when I ran a playtest one-shot of my new adventure, Phandalin After Dark, and it went really well. Both in terms of the adventure and using the new rules.

Two members of our group have the new Player's Handbook, too (Austin, my DQFM cohost, has it as well) so we'll be figuring it out as we go, and it won't be just me adjudicating and looking things up.

Have y'all played with the new rules yet? What do you think?

To VTT or Not To VTT?

One cool thing is that we usually don't use a VTT for our games. In 3 years, it's just not been a thing. We do this partly because even though it's online, it's an escape from most of us working on screens all day. Despite being there over Discord, we don't really interact with anything digitally.

For this one, I'm using the D&D Beyond Maps feature to go through dungeons and such. It's not a full VTT yet--not like Project Sigil will be or like Roll20 and Foundry currently are--but it's a good way to integrate the content and characters people have made so the rolls show up in a log. That's really it.

There are basic features so far in DDB Maps and that's really all I need. If anything, I would adore them incorporating the Encounters feature into it and having them inserted by default when choosing the content you already own in your library.

So far, that's the biggest benefit to Roll20--any modules are fully fleshed out and stocked and require almost no setup for digital use. Maps definitely is an Alpha release that's barebones. But like I said, we don't use a lot of VTT features anyway.

Either way, it's been a neat experiment for the group so far. I'll report back.

I'm excited for a big adventure like this. It's been a long time since I DM'd anything this expansive (that was Descent into Avernus, and I have many thoughts on that book, which I'm sure I'll get into over time).

Our party can be pure chaos, and I am used to accounting for that, so it will definitely be an interesting take on something that's a lot higher stakes than our usual adventures tend to be.

Have you run Vecna: Eve of Ruin? Do you want to? Hit me up in the comments and let's talk!

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