Ex D&D head Ray Winninger commented on Chris Perkins’ interview with Polygon where the latter revealed that Vecna: Eve of Ruin was originally going to feature a culmination of a long-seeded time-travelling obelisk plotline, saying that “Thats not actually the case.”
The Polygon interview was posted on February 8th, and Winninger responded on BlueSky two days later:
I wrote the original brief for this product. It was originally supposed to be a campaign that celebrated D&D’s 50th by sending the players on a tour of all the classic settings we reintroduced for 5E—Ravenloft, Eberron, Spelljammer, DL, and, of course FR—to battle a multiversal threat.
Lots of cameos from D&D notables. The campaign book was also supposed to include guidelines for incorporating your own home brew world(s) into the story. The final battle was to take place in the dungeon below Castle Greyhawk, where everything started.
Had Chris led it, I don’t doubt he would have picked up the thread of the obelisks he placed in his earlier adventures (and I like the ideas he lays out), but that wasn’t the original intent. Not sure why the staff drifted away from my brief, but Im sure they had their reasons.
The product was certainly never intended to be any sort of “coda” to 5E. We never saw the revised core books anything but a continuation of 5E.
Perkins originally told Polygon that “The reason it was dropped was that different people were in charge of the adventure design… I had rolled off a lot of my hands-on product work to help out with other parts of the business. And so, when I creatively walked away from the day-to-day adventure creation, we sort of lost the plot.” He went on to say “The original plan, in my mind, was that we would actually culminate the story by going back in time to fight the Netherese Empire…It was always on our radar to bring Netheril back in some way. And this was the way I envisioned it happening, because the only way you could really fight Netheril again is to travel back in time.”
It seems, though, that Perkins’ plan never got into development, although he did indicate that “We actually did some concept artwork on Netheril in anticipation of ending the obelisk story there, and it never coalesced”.
The final version of Eve of Ruin was a high level adventure in which players visit Sigil, and are tasked with assembling the Rod of Seven Parts, each piece of which is located in a different D&D world, from the Forgotten Realms‘ Underdark to Dragonlance’s Krynn, Ravenloft, Eberron, and more.
Read more at this site