Die, Vecna, Die!

Die, Vecna, Die!, German for "The Vecna: The", is/was about the last second-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure, year 2000, by peak Bruce R. Cordell and Steve Miller. This underpins the metaplot which propelled archlich Vecna, already awesome, to the Greyhawk pantheon. Unlike some modules in recent memory, these two authors kept the PCs at the forefront.

It is the third in a trilogy. Zeb Cook's wretched Vecna Lives! and Monte Cook's much-better Vecna Reborn precede this one.

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

The party starts at Tovag Buragu across the Hellfurnaces, one of the old-school Greyhawk mysterious settings, which - we learn - hosts rifts through time and space. These lead to a network of planes including an easter-egg shared with Queen of the Demonweb Pits: the Pink Ocean. Also: true ghouls from Wolfgang Baur's classic "White Kingdom", Dungeon #70. Ultimately, the PCs need Vecna's home demiplane Cavitius. That's through Cirithburg, and its Adytum.

Cavitius is an agreeably horrid part of the Dread. The highpoints in Vecna's palace are, of course, his sundry mummified extremities which the party members can try on, including the Head.

The Vecna, The heads into Sigil itself for the climactic showdown. Through one of the biggest plots in the series Vecna manages to rules lawyer himself out of his home of Citadel Cavitius and into Sigil. His presence there starts to wreck the plane and not even Her Serenity manages to oust him. So she employs the adventurers in a desperate attempt to stop Vecna from reshaping the multiverse. This scenario ends with what might be The Lady of Pain changing how things work in the multiverse, heralding the arrival of 3e.

This story also has more information about Mok'sylk, a being seemingly on the same power level as The Lady of Pain.

Reception

As a crossover between Greyhawk, Planescape, and Ravenloft at once, DVD has attracted the reasoned reception you can expect from all three fanbases.

DVD's three-act structure is, at heart, a planar romp. Planescape fans were used to jarring shifts in theme between one setting and the next. As sold to Greyhawk and Ravenloft players, that tonal shift hurt their heads.

Planescape fans for their part object that this dead guy from Greyhawk should best their Holy Mother, the Lady of Pain (ora nobis!). Although, Vecna is channelling a force similarly transcendent over the Great Wheel. Er. Maybe.

Greyhawkers on rec.games.frp.dnd puzzled how to slot Vecna's new backstory with the lore of the Flanaess - Vecna should have grown up in a Flan-speaking area; but at this time (the Devastation / Colorless Fire) there was a vast Völkerwanderung from west to east, mostly Oerid in the region at hand.

Ravenloft fans continued the rage they'd inherited from Vecna Lives! and Vecna Reborn, that here was an outside character making a mockery of the gothic rules behind their beloved setting. Tracy Hickman must have been laughing his underwear off. Well at least now Vecna isn't their problem anymore.

DVD currently (July 2020) enjoys 3.9/5 on GoodReads. They figure it was well written and fun to play. For all that the skeletal Medial Digit was well-applied to grognards' faces. The story is handled in a way that is believable and works, pressuring the party to work fast to save pretty much everything.

Legacy

This was the module which heralded the canon-changes in Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, most of all the Planes.

Greyhawk didn't change as much - it didn't have to, this time, inasmuch as there already existed a (2e) "Living Greyhawk" and its Gazetteer as an emergency correction to earlier mistakes. Which is just as well because Cordell and Miller weren't experts in Greyhawk lore; it wasn't easy to fit Vecna's past in Greyhawk's, whether before or after the Twin Cataclysms.