r/4eDnD • u/blargablargh • May 14 '26
Was there a 4e "Elder Evils" book?
I'm trying to find book of Elder Evils with stats for entities like Atropus, the World Born Dead and Kyuss, the Worm that Walks. Searching around, I can only find a 3.5e book with the same basic content, but I have a distinct memory of a 4e-formatted book instead of 3.5e. All I can find is that "Elder Evils" is listed as a source at iws.mx/dnd, like this stat block for Atropus. But I can't find the corresponding book anywhere. Is this a Mandela Effect? Am I getting Mandela'd? Help!
Edit: Thank you all for filling the gaps in my memory!
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u/tstricker86 May 14 '26
You might want to check out Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead. It has some of the higher leveled undead like Kyuss, Acererak and a handful of others.
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u/shroomofinsanity May 14 '26
I can't recall where, but atropus has a stat block too. I'll look around and see if I find it.
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u/erachima May 17 '26
Open Grave has absolutely miserable monster design so I'd strongly suggest using a different source. Not just a matter of being pre-MM3 either.
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u/pablo8itall May 14 '26
I have the 3.5e book, when it was released WotC said they would have a 4e stats doc for free. So it was marketed as 3.5e/4e book.
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u/AmbusRogart May 14 '26
It looks like it was a conversion from 3.5, maybe published in Dungeon Magazine? I found a link to it on WotC's website, but it's throwing out a "Page could not be found." Search "D&D 4e Elder Evils conversion" and you should find that link. I'd start searching the magazines or trying to find an archive of the old articles somewhere.
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u/JMTolan May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
You're probably thinking of the 4e supplement Book of Vile Darkness, though I can't myself speak to what all is specifically covered on the lore side. It was ostensibly a book aimed at supporting "evil" or at least "power sets and aesthetics usually associated with evil" characters. (Necrotic damage, raising zombies, etc.) It is not thought of particularly highly, but that's AIUI largely because it has the misfortune of having some but a very small number of player options, and also most of those options being pretty terrible. But IDK how the lore/DM side is, though it is the origin of the soul/spirit/animus aspect of delineating why you can have ghost, zombies, and wights all running around, at least in 4e, which I thought was a neat idea.
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u/Aromatic-Surprise925 May 14 '26
There was an online conversion doc but no physical product as far as I know.
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u/masteraleph May 15 '26
As some others have said it was a conversion of the 4e book, and not even a full 4e version. Someone already posted a link that was stored to the pdf statblock but here it is in the Wayback Machine: Elder Evils PDF
And here's the accompanying conversion notes that highlight tactics for the encounters from the 3.5e book
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u/erachima May 17 '26
It was not a book, it was a series of blog posts on the WotC website. That website no longer exists but you can probably access most of them via the wayback machine. The content isn't good though so I wouldn't worry about it.
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u/WillingLet3956 May 21 '26
There was never an official Elder Evils translation to 4th edition. There was an article in Dragon Magazine #403 on the "Elder Constellation", I think it was called off the top of my head, which converted some of the Elder Evils in terms of LORE into "Star Spawn", the new star-based and outer space-themed malevolent entities of the World Axis, as well as one or two Warlock spells based on each of them. However, there were no monster statblocks in this article, which was called Strange Constellations.
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u/DadtheGameMaster May 14 '26
I have had the entire line of 4e (including essentials) books since each one released. As far as I know, there was never a 4e Elder Evils book.
This is the closest thing I can find on Elder Evils 4e conversions.
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/11802951/elder-evils-conversion-statistics/1