D&D General Former Head of D&D Says Vecna: Eve of Ruin Was Not Going To Feature Obelisk Plot

Parmandur said:

The problem with rewritten high level Campaigns since the dawn of time...

The third possibility is that even if you have a group dialed in at the right Level range, they might have their own stories they are invested in at that point that the modules may not fit.

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I think Eve of Ruin is kind of smart in that regard since designers clearly knew that majority of D&D campaigns end around levels 10-13 and wrote it as a nostalgia fest where you can get to play your old fave again. It's one of things that appeals to me because it sidesteps the issues you mentioned.

Another thing to consider is how much weight these familiars can carry with their strength score. My PC is a wizard and she makes most of the party carry everything other than her robe, wand and spellbook, but anything short of a arcane caster, barbarian or monk might be too heavy to fly with, and/or run around.

Junkyard Tornado said:

I'm wondering if anybody here has actually played through or ran Vecna Eve of Ruin? I've flipped through it and read a lot of commentary, but don't know of any group actually trying to play it. Curious how it actually went.

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I'm playing through it now. I'm kind of meh on it so far.

jolt said:

I find that pretty much all published adventures are railroads. A book can provide a situation with 16 possible resolutions, but it generally can't provide 16 different situation that may or may not come up depending on how the PC's decide to proceed. I remember a lot of complaining from DM's back in the AD&D days that, when running a module, players would immediately wander off to do something the module didn't account for.

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I think the problem isn’t that published adventures have to be railroads. It’s that most of them are written as pre-planned stories rather than as living situations.
The common structure is very linear: A happens, then B happens, maybe if they feel fancy, depending on what happened in B then either C or D happens. But it’s still basically A to B to C to D. It’s encounter-based design where one scene exists mainly to push you into the next scene. The “better” versions just feel like a slightly more elaborate choose-your-own-adventure book.
That approach assumes the story is the backbone and the players move through it.
But you can design adventures differently.
Instead of writing a timeline of events the PCs are supposed to experience, I prefer to design what I’d call a “frozen piece of time.” I build an area in detail: the locations, the factions, their resources, their relationships, and most importantly their intentions. I define what each group wants and what they would do if the PCs never showed up.
In other words, I don’t prepare a story. I prepare a situation.
Once that situation exists, I turn the players loose and let their actions collide with those intentions. The story emerges from that collision.
If the cult wants to complete a ritual in three days, that countdown exists whether the PCs follow the “main plot” or wander off to chase rumors. If two factions are on the brink of war, that tension doesn’t pause just because the party is shopping. The world keeps moving. The players aren’t trying to stay on the track. They’re navigating a dynamic environment.
This approach is much more resilient. In a linear module, if players go off-script, the DM either has to improvise heavily or drag them back to the plot. In a situation-based design, wandering off isn’t breaking the adventure. It’s engaging with it from an unexpected angle.
The key difference is this:

A railroad assumes compliance.
A situation assumes agency.

For me, this is the pinnacle of TTRPG adventure design. The whole unique strength of tabletop RPGs is that they aren’t novels or video games. They are dynamic systems driven by human choice. Designing them like pre-written stories feels like using a physics engine to reenact a train schedule.
That’s why I sometimes find it strange that companies like Wizards of the Coast still mostly publish heavily plot-driven adventures. The medium is uniquely suited to living-world design, yet the dominant format often leans toward narrative sequencing.
You don’t need to prepare sixteen branching storylines. You need to prepare a coherent world state with believable motivations and pressure points. Conflict naturally generates outcomes. Players will create their own narrative through the consequences of their choices.
When that happens, the story doesn’t feel delivered. It feels discovered.