Vecna

Lord of the Rotted Tower (a.k.a. Whispered One, Undying King)

Vecna, also known as the Whispered One, the Undying King, and the Lord of the Rotted Tower, is a powerful, mortal-born archlich who achieved godhood.

Appearance

When Vecna was first reborn, he appeared as a gaunt husk of a man wearing long tattered red, purple, and black robes. His skin was weathered and decayed, pulled taut against his skeletal frame; there was no hair on his spotted head. His cheeks were sunken around skeletal teeth in a terrible grin. His left hand was missing, and where his left eye would be was just an empty socket constantly streaming sickly green magical energy upwards.
When he later appeared in incorporeal form, he was wearing beautiful crushed velvet robes with gold trim, and had adorned himself with lavish gems, baubles, and other jewelry. His right eye was a sickly pale blue.
After he ascended, Vecna was physically transformed: he had become huge, with screaming souls entwined within his limbs. The left eye socket was almost blindingly bright. He had recovered his left hand, which pulsed with the same green energy as the eye socket, and his ribcage glowed from within with sickly green light. He wore red robes over golden armor.

Personality

Vecna was arrogant, egotistical, and ambitious. From the beginning of his attempted ascension he maintained a confident and condescending veneer, believing he had already won. Vecna treated those beneath him as insignificant mortals or pests too unimportant to worry about. Despite this, he proved he could be cold, calculating and ruthless when it suited him, able to manipulate people's greatest fears to his own benefit and enjoy it. He sought to "play with the toys" left by other gods beyond the Divine Gate and reshape the world, his Exandria, to his liking.

Divine Domains

Arcana, Death, Grave, Knowledge

Divine Symbols & Sigils

Tenets of Faith

Learn all you can, and keep hidden that which you know. Reveal what pieces you must, but never the whole.
Express and cultivate the evil within yourself, and in doing so, recognize it in others to exploit them for your own benefit.
Seed the ruin of all who worship other deities, until only those who kneel before the Whispered One remain.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

One of Vecna's main laboratories on Exandria was in the Verstglade of Wildemount, where he performed countless experiments that left the forest corrupted and haunted by abominations of his creation.
A century before the Calamity, the archmage Vecna achieved lichdom, amassed followers and undead forces, and with them disappeared into the Shadowfell, where they conquered the city of Thar Amphala and built a tower called Entropis that served as his base. From the shadow plane, Vecna exploited the celestial solstice, a merging of ley energies, that gave him the power to open portals for his forces at a whim, giving them space to strike with precision and retreat to Thar Amphala before retaliating forces could muster. Thus he overcame some old enemies and forced them to bend the knee, slew them and raised them as a loyal undead. One such rival, Kas, accepted vampirism in exchange for fealty as a Vecna's chief lieutenant. Vecna forged for him a relic blade with a fraction of Kas's consciousness. In the months of terrorizing Vecna's enemies that followed, he became Kas the Bloody-Handed.
Vecna's foes figured out how to reverse-engineer the celestial solstice. Just as Vecna was attempting to ascend to godhood with the Ritual of Seeding atop Entropis, a holy army led by Yos Varda attacked Thar Amphala. Yos Varda climbed Entropis and attempted to duel Vecna but was defeated. Vecna, winded by his effort, opened up an opportunity for Kas. He attacked the whispered one with the gifted blade encroaching to usurp the lich. The ensuing battle destroyed them both: all that remained of Vecna were his left eye and left hand, and all that remained of Kas was in that blade.
Vecna was later considered a lesser deity or "patron saint" of dark, coveted secrets, and this belief and worship lent him new power.
His following was scattered across Exandria, calling themselves the Remnants, who will sacrifice their lives, prefacing Vecna's return through the Ritual of Seeding. In order to make him a passage back to the Material Plane, they seized three ziggurats of Ioun, the goddess of knowledge and a fierce rival of Vecna, and corrupted them.

Divine Classification

Betrayer God

Pronouns

He/him/his

Gender

Male