Dungeons and Dragons Lore: Vecna

Vecna tries to become a god. Mortals: I'll take a souvenir

Really love the archetype of magical object that’s just a severed limb of something extremely ancient and powerful.

You too, troll your players with the "head of Vecna"

The Phallus of Vecna gives a +4 bonus to intimidation checks...

With so many Vecna body parts around is surprising that the Cult didn't try to gather them all and assemble them into a flesh golem, it could be an avatar for Vecna.

What I like most about Vecna is that he's one of those badass wizard dudes that permeates D&D lore like Mordenkainen or Xanathar or what have you; He is very much like any sort of knowledge starved wizard who is willing to completely flaunt established rules that they dont agree with just because they can, or just to see what would happen. He feels human in his deeds and ambitions. Most wizards at some point in time have likely shared a thought or two. "Can I do this crazy magical feat?", "Could I outwit this being supposedly smarter than me?", "What's the answer to this cosmic enigma?" A wizard who has ever asked themselves these questions and then acted toward answering them is walking roads Vecna traveled. This can be especially eye opening (pun not intended) revelation when the party's resident wizard, who's insatiable curiosity and drive to improve themself as a mage is suddenly faced with how painfully similar they are to this dark wizard turned pseudo-god. Few wizards WANT to die. Through magic you can live a very long natural life, but its never really enough, is it? Some arcane secrets take decades to unveil and even if you get 200 years of life out of your magic imagine what discoveries you'll be missing out on when you're gone? This is especially true of human wizards who aren't as endowed with a naturally long lifespan like their elven or dwarvish peers. Vecna and his core motives are beyond relatable to any lover of magic and secret solver. He feels genuine, and that sort of thing is honestly rare to see in a fantasy villain. Like... Who can see Strahd's point of view? Who can be like "oh yeah, Orcus? His inexplicable evilness and drive to destroy is totally relatable"? They're these big, bad, evil dudes who do evil because they're evil and you don't want them doing the things they wanna do because even if you're also evil, they'll probably wanna kill you for the fun of it. Its hard to be immersed in that because the average player isn't playing a Demon God, or a super vampire and gets to expierence the things such a creature might want. We can play wizards though. We can find all the arcane secrets the cosmos forgot, we can expierence the power these things give us... Ultimately, Vecna feels like his infancy could be a Wizard you could have at your table or that you have played before. There's no greater villain than that.

He made contract with others who were more powerful then him, and gathered enough power to destroy them. What a badass

Vecna being trapped in Ravenloft while being a demigod says a lot about the ability of the Dark Powers

I remember hearing about a gag campaign (probably apocryphal, but funny nontheless) about a gag magic item called The Head of Vecna. It was the first trap for murder hobos and party killers I'd ever heard of. It was a mildly enchanted mummified head with semi-enchanted costume jewelry. The idea was that the party would murder each other to get ahold of this no doubt fabulous artifact, usable by having someone cut off your head and replace it with the head of Vecna. Edit: And that's what I sound like when I comment before watching the entire video.

you know the head of veknar joke reminds me of the ancient Mayan and Incan myths of magicians that let themselves be killed for show or because they had jealous cousins that wouldn't leave them alone until they thought they were dead, anyways afterwards they bring themselves back to life and there audience or cousins realized what happened and wanted the experience such a thing for themselves, and thus asked to be killed.... The magicians did as requested, just choosing not to bring them back to life afterwards.

I got a TPK by telling the party they had found "The Head of Vecna".

Vecna: “Oh, you don’t get it. I don’t want to rule. I don’t want to kill. I don’t exactly seek power or victory. All I want in this world is research.”

One more fact left out about the hand and eye of Vecna is the magic items are based off the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn from Micheal Moorcock's Corum series. Much like how Blackrazor from the white plume mountain adventure is based off of Stormbringer in Moorcock's Elric series.

An Overgod wanting to speak with you must be a completely incomprehensible, yet impossible to misconstrue experience. I envision a few scenarios. 1. Reality falls away as if all of creation were theater setting and you are simply nowhere, yet in the presence of the Overgod. 2. One moment you are perceiving your surroundings and the next you can perceive nothing but the Overgod, regardless of language, sight, sound, distance or time which would be meaningless barriers to them. 3. The "conversation" is instant. No time passes between the moments the Overgod contacts you, regardless of how long the two of you "spoke." You understand everything that was said, as is the Overgod's will.

7:12 The final fight scene from Vox Machina's fight against Vecna in Critical Role. Nice.

It's fascinating watching this after watching the first iteration of Critical Role and how much it featured Vecna. It really shows how a DM can use this information in a unique way and how little they need to tell/reveal to their players.

A small part of me thought the whole video would be "shhh, its a secret"

By the power of Grayskull! Is that you Skeletor?^^

I love using Vecna, or at least aspects of him like the many relics of Vecna in some of my game. had one game that was basically a large game of fetch quests that lead back to a cult of Vecna that was wishing to obtain all of the many scattered body parts of Vecna. Though most would think the higher rank priests of Vecna were seeking the parts to use on themselves, but the group would find it was far worse as they uncover the cult had been also building a powerful steam-punk like flesh golem that they would install the various parts into. An that the cult were seeking to create a powerful avatar of Vecna with the literal body parts of Vecna as a base, since how better to create a vessel that could be filled with his power, but to use actual pieces of himself in it's creation.

In one of the Living Greyhawk adventures, you meet a group of Kobolds praying to the bones of the World Serpent. You can chose to spend a Time unit and pray/meditate with them for a inherent/ permanent +1 buff to one of your stats it was a 1d6 roll for the buff. It also came with a DC 13 will save to keep from losing -1permanent to a stat as you fall under the sway of the world serpent and eventually came with a whole bunch more to the buffs/curses of the World serpent if you failed in following adventures in the story ark. The burial mound of the World serpent is visible on some of the maps of Oreth. It’s a Massive mountain range in the shape of a dragon.