WotC Vecna Eve of Ruin: Everything You Need To Know

WotC has posted a 19-minute video telling you 'everything you need to know' about Vecna: Eve Of Ruin.

• Starts at 10th level, goes to 20th.
• Classic villains and setting, famous characters, D&D's legacy.
• Vecna wants to become the supreme being of the multiverse.
• Vecna is a god of secrets and secrets and the power of secrets are a theme throughout the book.
• A mechanical subsystem for using the power of secrets during combat.
• Going back to Ravenloft, the Nine Hells, places where 5th Edition has been in the last 10 years.
• It would be a fun 'meta experience' for players to visit locations they remember lore about.
• Finding pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts, pieces throughout the multiverse.
• Each piece in one of seven distinct planes or settings.
• Allustriel Silverhand has noticed something is wrong, puts call out to Tasha and Mordenkainen, who come to her sanctum in Sigil.
• The (10th level) PCs are fated to confront Vecna.
• Lord Soth and Strahd show up. Tiamat is mentioned but doesn't appear 'on screen'.
• Twists, turns, spoilers.
• It's a 'love letter to D&D'.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Going back in time creates an alternate timeline / reality. The two things are linked.

Not necessarily. "The wrong Trouserleg of time", as Terry Pratchett put it, is only one possible resolution for the Grandfather Paradox. Another is that there is only one timeline, and you cannot change history no matter how hard you try. As soon as you travel into the past you are part of history (and will probably have to shoot JFK at some point).

But the Netherise Obelisk in Rime of the Frostmaiden is neither of these. It literally winds back time to the age of Netheril. That is now the present, and the future hasn't happened yet. Of course this is a non-canon ending (or is it?). This is the time travel variant that features in Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), although Doctor Who has featured the other variants as well.

 

[Older Beholder]

That is one of multiple possible time travel models. Seven Monkeys style time travel within one timeline with no changes is another possible model. Another where time travel can alter the one reality instead of creating or going to alternate ones is another.

Normally for me, when I read or watch fiction with alternate realities it feels assumed that it’s on the same timeline, ie. stuff is happening in one reality and stuff is happening in the other reality side-by-side and you can hop between the two without making a temporal jump. There can be realms where time passes differently - like Faerie - but it still doesn’t feel like time travel.

But it’s all fiction, so can be anything the writer wants. For example, time travel creating alternate timelines is just one view of how time travel works.

I think for me, it’s about consistency in how all this stuff works in the fictional world. When it starts to look like it’s just “anything goes” in order to achieve a desired effect in the story, then that can feel like lazy writing.

Not necessarily. "The wrong Trouserleg of time", as Terry Pratchett put it, is only one possible resolution for the Grandfather Paradox. Another is that there is only one timeline, and you cannot change history no matter how hard you try. As soon as you travel into the past you are part of history (and will probably have to shoot JFK at some point).

But the Netherise Obelisk in Rime of the Frostmaiden is neither of these. It literally winds back time to the age of Netheril. That is now the present, and the future hasn't happened yet. Of course this is a non-canon ending (or is it?). This is the time travel variant that features in Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), although Doctor Who has featured the other variants as well.

I agree with all of you, time travel and multiverse / parallel universes can stand on their own as concepts, and can be explained in different ways.

It’s just, and maybe it’s just how it is in my mind, but to me the two concepts work together like puzzle pieces or complimentary colours.

 

[Parmandur]

Is that changing canon or just fixing an error?

No, it was on purpose both times. They shrunk the landmass by over a third:

Oh, OK. I wouldn’t consider that a change on a story level. That’s just game designers indecisive about what scale to use.

Honestly, millions of square miles of territory dissappearing snd reappearing seem more important to me than political minutiae.

 

[dead]

Honestly, millions of square miles of territory dissappearing snd reappearing seem more important to me than political minutiae.

That’s not a story level change, though. In other words, the land didn’t literally shrink (in 3e) and then expand again in (5e) within the unfolding story of the Realms. It just occurred outside the story in game design.

Imagine selling that campaign world - “play in the wacky Realms where the land shrunk in 13xx DR and then resized itself in 14xx DR”. It would be ridiculous.

But there’s been heaps of changes in game design like this over the years that don’t play out in the fiction. I'm pretty sure they did the same thing with Kara-Tur. It was too big in the original boxed set so they resized it later. It doesn’t mean that literally happened in the setting.

So for me, political minutiae would definitely be a hundred times more important as that sounds like it would be more about the unfolding story of the Realms or shared multiverse.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

But what about alternate timelines...? Don't have to decanonize the novels per se to move the game prese Tatiana over a timelinenor two.

Hypothetically yes, but there maybe some issue with that too.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

No, it was on purpose both times. They shrunk the landmass by over a third:


Honestly, millions of square miles of territory dissappearing snd reappearing seem more important to me than political minutiae.

There is partly a csuse for that, it was partly caused by the Sundering.

 

[Demetrios1453]

That’s not a story level change, though. In other words, the land didn’t literally shrink (in 3e) and then expand again in (5e) within the unfolding story of the Realms. It just occurred outside the story in game design.

Imagine selling that campaign world - “play in the wacky Realms where the land shrunk in 13xx DR and then resized itself in 14xx DR”. It would be ridiculous.

But there’s been heaps of changes in game design like this over the years that don’t play out in the fiction. I'm pretty sure they did the same thing with Kara-Tur. It was too big in the original boxed set so they resized it later. It doesn’t mean that literally happened in the setting.

So for me, political minutiae would definitely be a hundred times more important as that sounds like it would be more about the unfolding story of the Realms or shared multiverse.

It literally says in SCAG, page 18:

"Early in 1487, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions abounded for months, as if the whole world was convulsing. Rumors spread of the chasms caused by the Spellplague suddenly vanishing, and stories circulated of known destinations being further away, as if the world had quietly added miles of wilderness between them."

So, no, it didn't occur outside the story in game design - the world, in-universe, did shrink and expand. As ridiculous as you might think it to be, the world, canonically and literally, did resize itself 1487 DR.

 

[Parmandur]

That’s not a story level change, though. In other words, the land didn’t literally shrink (in 3e) and then expand again in (5e) within the unfolding story of the Realms. It just occurred outside the story in game design.

Yes, it did, by a rather large amount, too. Thst changes literally everything.

 

[Nikosandros]

I think that, in some ways, the matter of the scale of the map depends a lot on the campaign style. In a very structured and per-ordained campaign in which events and transits happen at the speed of plot, the size of the map is just a bit of color. If the campaign has even a minimum of simulationism and/or open world gaming then the issue becomes extremely relevant.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the sheer epic scale of the change isn't clear to a lot of people. We aren't talking about a city being 100 miles or 112 miles from another place, we are talking about continent size changes.

For juat the Sword Coast region, leaving off the rest of Faerun:

In the 3E/4E material the Sword Coast region as defined in SCAG is 2.2 million square miles (approximately twice as large as India)

In the 1E/2E/5E material, the Sword Coast region is over 5 million square miles (just shy of Antarctica, the only country on Earth bigger than the Sword Coast region is Russia).

That means the land that disappears and comes back is about the size of Australia. Just for the Sword Coast.

That is an absurd change.