Patron-Exclusive Post: Vecna Lives! Session 1

Spoilers for the 1990 adventure for AD&D, Vecna Lives, ahead (specifically, its prologue). Read with caution if you want the intro to the adventure (and its shocking twist) to remain unspoiled.

I just finished running the first session of the aforementioned adventure on the Prismatic Wasteland Patreon server and am jotting down a summary of events, together with my impressions. I’d like to run monthly-ish games on the server going forward, so we are starting with a bang with a somewhat widely reviled adventure.

The big opening draw of this adventure is that the players get to play as classic D&D wizards, the “Circle of Eight” (but NOT Mordenkainen): Bigby, Nystul, Rary, Otiluke, Tenser (perhaps you’ve heard of his disk?!), et cetera. That is neat and probably cool for big Greyhawk-heads. (I have only a minor familiarity with Greyhawk as a setting.) And this is very much a Greyhawk adventure. The DM is advised to buy about $100 of Greyhawk branded products in addition to the adventure to run it. I didn’t do that, so the only things in this adventure that align with Official Cannon is what is actually contained in the adventure–the rest I (and the players) will make up anti-canon style.

We had 5 players, who assumed the roles of Bigby, Jallarzi, Tenser, Nystul, and Otto. I gave the players pre-made character sheets, stated as high level pseudo-Prismatic Wasteland characters, for each wizard, together with the short write-ups of each wizard’s personality. But to flesh the characters out a bit further, and to give the players more of an ownership of these characters, we had a bit of an improv session, with the prompt of “which other member of the Circle of Eight do you hate?” Tenser is full of self-hatred; Otto hates Nystul for Nystul’s predilection for puns (buddy, you would not like Barkeep on the Borderlands!); Nystul hates Otto for having such a normal name; Bigby (who, by the way, is like Charlie’s uncle from It’s Always Sunny, with crippling anxiety about his small hands–thus all the hand-based spells) hates Jallarzi for being so young (Jallarzi is the only Circle of Eight member in Greyhawk’s “40 under 40” list); and Jallarzi hates Drawmij (who didn’t appear in this adventure), who is Jallarzi’s ex that didn’t believe in or respect her, sort of a Legally Blonde situation.

The prologue of Vecna Lives is incredibly, lethally linear. Obeying the module’s commands, I set the wizards in front of a big mound and told them that it was suspicious and that they magically determined, off-screen, that it was the source of disruptions to divination magic. The mound is an entirely linear 4-room dungeon, which was easily completed in the 2-ish hours I planned for the session. 

In the entrance, Bigby used one of his handy spells to clear the growth blocking the way, and Nystul cast “Dancing Werelight”, which caused a human-shaped dancing entity created entirely out of light. None of the wizards carried torches, so this was just as good. Because each wizard had a huge repertoire of spells, the “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” idiom was certainly true. If someone asked one of the characters to light their cigarette, they would no doubt cast a fireball spell. This is a good thing, by the way. What is the point of playing a group of super-wizards if you aren’t tossing spells around like no one’s business?

However not all challenges were merely solved with magic. At one point, they used a stick to scrape mold off a door. Before, of course, magically becoming buff to hulk-smash the door. In the next room, there were several giant toads (which could spit out fireballs, but this never actually came up in play). Otto cast his “Tin Soldiers” spell, summoning a regiment of Napoleonic troops, which ended up massacring the frogs. They never stood a chance.

An ankheg was in the roots poking out of the ceiling, waiting to ambush the party while they fought the frogs, had its purpose robbed. They characters heard it squirming about overhead, and Otto commanded his troops to open fire at the ceiling. Miraculously, this didn’t cause a cave-in, and a wounded giant bug crashed to the floor. 

Nystul asked if they could interrogate the bug but was reminded that it is just a bug. So Nystul, who declared that they considered bugs to be objects, cast Polymorph any Object on the ankheg to turn it into a human. It transformed into a woman, still mortally wounded, and biting Nystul as they cast the spell. The woman, later named Tasha, was very confused, but Jallarzi, who minored in psychology, explained that her memories of being a bug and wanting to eat the wizards was a dream, and that the wizards would help her get free. Jallarzi also bandaged Tasha’s wounds and wrapped her in her outer cloak. Tasha opted to stay with the party for safety even as the party pressed forward.

Nystul and their dancing werelight got trapped in a forcecage. Otto cast Chime of Release to break the effect, but Nystul was pretty sure that they got out of the cage of their own. In the same hallway, they came across a small hole in the floor with sludge at the bottom. “Oh boy, my time to shine!” thought Tenser, who cast his signature Floating Disk spell, feeling useful for the first time in his life.

In the final room was a lich, apparently (or perhaps not), the eponymous Vecna. A fight began. In the module, you are basically just supposed to start essentially pointing at players and telling them that their characters were dead, but I stated up this Vecna and gave the player characters a fighting (but slim) chance. He was incredibly overpowered, but allowing Otto to command 12 musketeers (and later, for Bigby to have 12 fencers who were like the thumb-creatures from Spy Kids) certainly evened the odds. A mental reminder to rethink through how summoning should work in Prismatic Wasteland. It ended up being incredibly close, but one by one, the characters started dropping like flies. Tenser, drawing the attention of the gargoyles by casting a spell to summon a hawk, was mauled to death. Otto was charmed by Vecna and commanded his firing squad to execute Nystul after Nystul survived being choked to death by Vecna. Vecna snapped the neck of Otto, who realized at the very last second of their life that Vecna wasn’t as cool as he seemed. Bigby’s fencers did make short work of the gargoyles. Only Bigby and Jallarzi remained (Tasha was still alive but bleeding on the floor after being mauled to near-death by gargoyles). Bigby let Jallarzi take his wand of fireballs and sacrificed himself (taking fatal damage to his Intelligence) to cast a massively powerful spell against Vecna. Jallarzi cast a spell attack and fired a wand at Vecna. This was just enough to kill Vecna. (But this adventure is Vecna Lives?! What a ripoff). But Jallarzi and the dying Tasha, the sole survivors, are now trapped in the tomb, with no spells that allow them to teleport away. 

And jump cut to the actual protagonists! That’s right, folks, you don’t play the Circle of Eight in this adventure, you play their friends, who are out to solve what happened to the Circle of Eight. It is their adventure that will continue on the next installment. Tune in next time!