- The Warlock Celestial
is a great example of how
Warlocks don't necessarily have to have
a dangerous or even evil patron.
I talked to Mike Mearls
about this new subclass
for the Warlocks, and how
it's changing things up.
- Clerics, what we've
established of the cosmology
of Dungeons & Dragons,
is that Clerics are tied
to divine beings, gods,
or sort of concepts
imbued with the divine,
so it might be like the
Silver Flame from Eberron.
The celestial, though,
is rather than being
a divine being, per se,
it's a celestial being,
so it could be something like
an angel, a Cairn, a Unicorn,
or anything else that's a powerful,
good-aligned creature,
but it doesn't necessarily
have to be a god,
and that's the difference
between, for a Warlock,
Warlocks tend to make pacts
with specific individuals,
who are sharing power with the warlock,
rather than a Cleric,
gains power that's granted
to them by the divine.
And also with Celestials,
we've to assume, obviously,
it's a Celestial,
it's some sort of good-aligned creature,
so it's something the Celestial Warlock,
compared to other Warlocks, is a healer.
They gain Cure Wounds, as one of their
sort of, big first-level spells,
and one of their first class
features allows them to heal.
They also deal with radiant energy.
So I mean obviously, you can play an evil
Celestial Pact Warlock if you wanted to,
there's nothing stopping
you from doing that, but
the game kind of assumes
that celestial either means
good aligned or having to do
with radiant energy and healing
and so compared to a cleric,
where you think of a Divine Spellcaster,
you know you think they're going to be
tied to a domain like
the Cleric Class does,
where the god's portfolio
influences the followers magic.
The celestial is more specific
about being about radiant energy.
And it's almost like it's less refined,
compared to a cleric's
ability to wield magic,
and cosmologically it's
more of a brute force
way to get magic with a pact,
and that's kinda how we think
of the Warlock in general.
That the Warlock pact is like the,
it's almost like the a hack,
in the system of magic, rather than
sort of accepted or intended
ways in which people use spells
and in my mind, instead of my headcanon,
that's kind of why the warlock came out,
you know came into D&D later on.
It sort of took the
universe of D&D a while
to figure out how to use magic this way,
as opposed to the sort of more traditional
spell-slot-based ways of using magic.
And so yes, the Celestial, you can imagine
it might be something like, especially
say a Kuwatal, who might
have agents in the world.
And so the Kuwatal has
this pact with these agents
who are going on working on its behalf.
There are good aligned celestial
creatures who aren't gods
and because of that, you know,
one of the things I like
about warlocks in the pact
is that it can be be more personal.
A Kuwatal might have a desire
to protect a specific person,
a specific family or city,
where gods are more remote
in Dungeons and Dragons.
And I think that's something that a DM can
play up or a player can
really bring into the game.
The idea that the patron is more personal,
might be someone you have more
direct conversations with,
rather than speaking directly to Gond
or Thor, something like that,
where they're much more
remote and more abstract.
Yeah, so We really kinda
created it with this idea
with someone wanting and
playing more the heroic Warlock.
Warlocks traditionally have a
sinister bend to them in the game.
If you look at the player's handbook,
the initial patrons are either things
that are traditionally
very evil, like a fiend,
or the Great Old Ones,
or something that's kind of dangerous,
like maybe not evil but
not necessarily friendly,
like a Fae Lord.
So we wanted to kinda balance
the scales a little bit
and say being a Warlock
does not inherently
make you villainous, or doesn't
inherently make you dark and sinister.
That Celestial Beings, obviously
it's the Celestial Pact,
they can also create pacts.
And so it's kind of bouncing off that,
the storytelling possibilities,
and I also like the idea
of introducing a new healer
into the game, essentially
that you can run
a Warlock as your healer if you
don't want to play a Cleric,
you can play a character with
a very different casting tempo
who can still bring a lot of healing
to the table for the group.
- The Warlock Celestial is in
Xanathar's Guide to Everything
You can purchase that
book on dndbeyond.com
and also earn some
preorder bonuses as well.
I'm Todd Kenreck, thanks for watching.
