Stranger Things season 4 is invoking D&D’s most powerful villain

The first official trailer for Stranger Things season 4 dropped on Tuesday, to the delight of diehard fans. Suddenly all the drips and drabs of information delivered by Netflix, over the past few years, started to make sense. Oddly enough, the biggest piece of the puzzle was actually released late last year, in the form of season 4’s episode list. It also invokes Vecna, a sorcerer and god who is one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most infamous villains.

Tuesday’s trailer points to an evil, mysterious force lurking behind Hawkins Indiana. At the bottom of that theoretical pyramid of power are the dog-like demogorgons from seasons 1 and 2. Those, in turn, are controlled by the massive and powerful mind flayer from season 3. Sitting above them all is another, unnamed entity given voice for the first time in this new trailer.

” You’ve made everything a sham,” the voice laments. “Your suffering is almost at an end.” Cut to a rotting corpse, held together by filaments of gore and lit by an angry red flash. “You have lost,” it concludes.

Add in the fact that season 4, episode 2 is titled “Vecna’s Curse” and we’ve pretty much found season 4’s big bad.

Vecna was a sorcerer who turned himself into an undead abomination known as a lich only to eventually ascend to godhood. He was first introduced to D&D way back in 1976 with the publication of Dungeons & Dragons Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry, written by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume. According to Shannon Applecline, the history of DriveThruRPG’s product history, Blume was most likely responsible for his inclusion in the D&D Canon. Also of note is the fact that Vecna is an anagram for Jack Vance, a science fiction and fantasy author whose novels inspired the conceptual framework for how magic works in D&D.

Vecna originally entered the canon only as the mysterious source of two different artifacts. The Hand of Vecna was “a dry, shriveled, and blackened hands, similar to those that could have been caused having been burnt.” It turned its users into evil, and also had many difficult-to-control abilities, including levitation (but not limit) and the spell called Finger of Death.

The Eye, on the other … hand … was said to “glitter much in the same manner as the eye of a feline.” Among its powers was a particularly rare spell called “clairaudience,” which allows the user supernatural hearing and the ability to blink in and out of reality. There’s a catch, of course: In order to use the Eye of Vecna, users had to permanently graft it to their own skull, making its powerful blessings a curse that could not be removed.

“THE EFFECTS ON THE USER MAY NEVER BE ALTERED IN ANYMANNER,” declares Eldritch Wizardry all caps , “EVEN WISHES .”

Vecna has appeared several more times throughout the canon of D&D, including in the 5th edition Dungeon Masters Guide where he appeared as a part of a sample D&D pantheon for would-be Dungeon Masters to use in their world. But he appeared most recently as a god in Critical Role’s Vox Machina storyline. Grog Strongjaw, Keyleth, Marisha Ray, and another god called the Raven Queen helped Vecna drive his malevolent spirit out of the Material Plane. However, he wasn’t permanently killed.

Is it Vecna or someone else who acts and behaves like Vecna behind the scenes? Wizards of the Coast, D&D’s publisher, has been contacted to find out more. However, the name of the lich-turnedgod was not included in Netflix’s open-source ruleset. This would mean that special permission is required to use it.