As one of D&D's very few Celestial monsters, Varadrel is an agent of divine justice best compared to the personified disasters of Japanese kaiju.

To read the transcript, check out "Titans of Faerun", or see the full-color, "be not afraid" illustration of Varadrel, visit the show's website: https://scintilla.studio/varadrel-the-kaiju-angel/

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Meet my guests Jackson Lewis and Cassandra MacDonald:

https://twitter.com/honeybadger3495

https://twitter.com/theicequeer

Music by Jason Shaw at Audionautix.com

Several hours pass in the night and the village stirs with fear.

Many have already packed their things.

Entire flocks of livestock have been taken into the hills.

Every citizen across the town seems unsettled, terrified.

Houses stand empty, doors lay open as though people abandoned everything.

Something distant, a shadow in the Moonlight, And then a brilliant

white radiance over the hillside, a figure humanesque but wrong.

Six arms extending from its shoulders and waist.

A ring wrapped around it.

Six wings as it soars over its the lower half is but a sword.

Beneath it run a flock of unicorns.

As it soars towards the city, you step out to get a little

better, look at this creature and the hairs on the back of your neck,

stand straight up, you feel your breath kind of catching your chest.

Whatever this thing is, you know, it's here for one thing you've seen demons.

You've seen the, the most vile, cruel pit fiends rip apart humans with

their bare hands, and laugh about it.

But this thing is different because the aura it radiates is

irrevocably, cosmically good.

But it still begs the question, "why does this thing terrify you?

Why does this thing trigger every single fight or flight

response in your entire body?"

And as it raises its hand and a spectral image of a holy sword

appears, and it flings it at one of the buildings utterly obliterating it,

reducing it to ash, you realize why.

It's not here to protect you.

It's here to kill something around you.

my name is Jackson Lewis.

, they, them, I have been doing, D and D stuff for two years now, almost

as long as I'm playing D and D.

And I am Cassandra, the only Cassandra, she, her

jackson, I have to tell you, when I first started doing interviews for

this project, it was back in June of last year, and, uh, Steve Fidler was one of

the first guys I interviewed He told me

I think that you would get a kick out of talking to Jackson Lewis.

He did a Kaiju book.

I think it's called Titans of the Ancient World.

And it's all CR 30 creatures.

uh, that makes me feel very, very good.

That's Steve Fidler would recommend me.

We are talking about a monster from my upcoming book, Titans

of Faerun, the stealth sequel to Titans of the Ancient World.

It is a book of seven kaiju set in the Forgotten Realms.

Varandrel is the monster.

Varandrel, the Reverie of Saints, a CR 30 celestial that is less a cognizant

sapient being and more of a solidified wavelength of celestial intent.

Yeah.

Uh, okay.

Uh,

jeez, this is gonna take some doing, uh,

Look, you didn't bring Jackson and I on because you wanted

something simple and straight forward.

No, I'm here for the funky stuff.

Uh, always have been.

I've always grown up loving Godzilla, Ultra Man,

Power Rangers, stuff like that.

So I've always been in love with like giant monsters.

So I decided, Hey, D&D has exactly one kaiju in it, called the Terrasque, and

you need way, way more to be, to be cool.

And I want D&D to be cool.

So I made this book of Titans of the Ancient World.

So in approaching kaiju design, I approached it a

lot different than a monster.

A kaiju is rather a force of nature rather than like an, individual monster.

It translates directly into "strange beast."

It literally just means like a monster of titanic size and power.

It does not interact with the environment in a way that a normal monster does.

Godzilla, when he walks through a environment and when he goes towards

like, whatever his goal is, he disturbs the environment around him.

Things are left almost irrevocably changed in his wake, whether it be

the radiation he gives off or the destruction as he like carves a path

through like a city or something.

Additionally, you can't really reason with Godzilla.

You can't like go up to him and be like, let's enter a dialogue about

the ramifications of your actions.

these things are rather like forces of nature.

you wouldn't try to debate a tidal wave or an earthquake or hurricane, , and

you wouldn't try to debate a kaiju.

Pure mechanical crunch a kaiju has much, much, much more health points than a

monster does of the same CR because it is such a massive and, titanic

set piece almost that you need that extra health points to, put on a show

essentially for the player so they don't just like burst it down very quickly.

Challenge rating is generally just a rough estimation in D and

D of how dangerous or scary a creature is.

Runs one to 30 in 5E.

Historically challenge rating meant, a party of four players of this level would

be an even challenge for this creature.

So a CR five creature is an even challenge for four fifth-level characters.

You can safely assume that if a creature's challenge rating is above

25, as all of these creatures in the book are, , it's end of campaign stuff,

and very much end of character stuff,

In designing a kaiju encounter, you should never put a kaiju

with the sole, goal of being like, just kill it because that's almost

never what a kg is employed against.

There's always some secondary goal.

You gotta stop Godzilla from making it to like the nuclear reactor.

You gotta stop the Cloverfield monster from eating the nuke or whatever.

There's always a secondary goal, in addition to like

actually fighting the kaiju.

You don't want to drop a monster like this into an

encounter, and just have like 200 soldiers shoot arrows at it until it's suffered

enough paper cuts that it falls over.

Cause that's all that always falls flat dramatically.

And I think it takes away from it.

So I really do appreciate the way that Jackson goes about these creatures.

It is very much designed to be more like a, , oh,

crap, a monster rather than a monster who you're like, oh, this is going

to be a fair fight for my players.

After that, the kind of gods of Faerun, they were like, Hey, you know what?

It's not probably not a good thing that we are messing around

with the material world a lot.

So what they did was they created Varandrel.

And I'd like to read a little bit from Cassandra's flavor text she wrote, " For

many problems, this was sufficient.

Some problems, however, are entirely nail shaped and simply require a hammer.

Varandrel was that hammer, Varandrel is constructed from the

shards of divine relics, anointed with the blood of fallen gods.

It is a being of intent and totality rather than something you could walk up

and just have a normal conversation with.

is it at all possible to describe Varandrel's physical form?

Oh, absolutely.

it is approximately 64 feet tall, from the tip of it's holy symbol

that is welded to the bottom half of his body to the top of its head.

It has six arms, green skin.

Every set of its arms is in another state of divine prayer.

Two of its arms are in the state of what you would typically see

in like a pagan Baphomet statue.

His left arm is raised two fingers out, thumb extended, one at his chest.

The other is hands clasped together his waist in prayer.

That's a, what you would say would be like a typical Christian form of prayer.

And then his third set of arms is extended outwards, palms upwards at the heavens.

That would be like a Judeo, form of prayer.

All of his poses are, are meant to evoke the sense of like religious

wonder and religious fear.

it has, eyes everywhere on its body.

and its held aloft by six feathery wings.

It also has a halo of gold, both surrounding its body

and surrounding its head.

It also has no face, no facial features

Okay.

Yeah, this one's going to be difficult for an auditory medium, but I think that's

in keeping with what you're going for.

definitely.

Cassandra MacDonald:

It's, uh, "be not afraid."

well, yeah.

That's where I want to kick it off because, if you read "Celestial" and

replace it with the word "angel," which is an easy thing to do for D&D fifth

edition, why this incomprehensible flying barbed wire sword covered in eyes?

Simply put because it's job isn't to make the

denizens of Faerun comfortable.

Its job is to absolutely annihilate any threat to the

material realm or to the heavens.

Although, it emits this aura of like ease and reverence when it's not like doing

this job, it's just like hovering there.

But when it is directed to move , it moves with purpose and it drives

everything that should not be there out so it can do its job.

essentially.

if you would ask Varandrel,, Hey, why do you look so freaky?

He would be like, it's not my job to make you comfortable.

It's my job to protect you.

I felt that, in designing Varadrel, in keeping with the same theme of solars

and deva and planetars, who have these angelic weapons that innately deal

like bonus damage, like radiant damage Varadrel is like the pinnacle, the

totality of that, design philosophy.

So he has the ability to conjure up spectral angelic weapons and

use them as, as if they were like an angelic weapon themselves.

He has an ability called holy echo, he will cry out with, a holy

word, like a word in celestial.

And it deals radiant damage to people.

or he can actually cause it to just hit you with the sound of the voice,

because it's such a powerful and such a, upper echelon of language.

In addition to his mythic trait, shards of the divine, where if you damage

Varadrel enough, shards of him will fall off and he regains hit points.

And then four Deva are formed out of their shards that fall off.

his mythic actions revolve around empowering the deva, moving them

around to reposition them to better fight or even fusing two

deva together to form a planetar.

I feel that Varadrel is in being a, creature that's born of angelic authority

and pure lawfulness, he is, uniquely equipped to be a tactician and a leader.

The same way, like a supercomputer is a tactician and a leader, as in, I'm going

to calculate exactly what it takes to win.

And then I'm going to do exactly that and tell you to do exactly that.

he's not really, , a friend to his man.

he's really more of a computer playing a game of chess rather

than an actual, like tactician

So obviously you designed this monster to do a thing, to

make your players feel a certain way, to evoke a certain feeling

or create a certain set peace.

What do you think makes it effective in achieving that goal?

I think the, seeing the artwork of Varadrel and then,it's the

flavor of its abilities are effective and if it's sent against the players,

then they have that, uh, that it's more like the feeling of a nuclear bomb

going off of that drop in your stomach.

The, uh, the feeling of like dread and the, oh, we've, we've messed up.

We've really messed up.

Um, or if they have to like mitigate Varadrel's damage, as it deals with

some other, like greater evil, it's a, oh God, we've got to do something

to stop it from destroying everything.

Yeah, that was kind of the, uh, perspective

that I wrote Varadrel from.

I figured that if you're at a point in your game where the players are

in conflict with Varadrel, uh, you're running a very strange game of D and D.

So the

flavor I worked around was the idea of how are you going to deal with

this thing that is going to get the job done one way or another?

And that's reflected in the, uh, his health points

and his resistances as well.

Varadrel cannot be harmed by any weapon unless it's first

dipped in the blood of a deity.

Although it can be effected by like spells and other esoteric abilities,

like if you try to hit it with a sword, he's just gonna flick you away.

Like you're a flee.

And this goes back to like not wanting kaiju to be

dropped by a whole bunch of paper cuts.

Exactly.

Yeah.

What do you have to do with, or for your players before

you put their address in the game?

I think you would have to signal like signposts to

your players this is not a dragon.

This is not a, giant, this is a literal, solidified wave form of celestial

wrath and vengeance coming against either you or something near you.

if you try to fight this, there is a very slim chance you will win.

And there's a huge chance of the you'll die horribly.

I signal that in one of the adventure hooks

that I put down for Varadrel.

Essentially Varadrel has been seen in the countryside by groups of

travelers, caravaners, or adventures.

But no matter how many people are in these groups, there's always

conflicting stories, even though it's something so massive in

theory that no one could miss it.

There's only ever two or three people from a given group who

seem to believe it was there.

And this is the consequence of the aura, the calming aura that it puts

out also causes the weak-willed to forget that it was ever there.

So it really gives the sense of like, this is something the mind

was not meant to comprehend.

Um,

One of the things I include under Varadrel's

minions is, as I mentioned, oftentimes unicorns will gather around it and

they're not there to help it fight.

They're there because they know it's going to leave a wake of dead who will need aid.

Exactly.

I try to ease the horror by presenting that as like,

yes, there is good intention here.

This is a good thing, but its purpose has collateral damage and other Celestials

have come to recognize that and are operating to try and mitigate it.

But it is still this driven embodiment of deific rage.

Exactly.

If you like giant monsters, pina coladas and mythic actions,

then pick up Titans of favor.

All right.

The best place to follow me, it would be twitter.com.

And my handle is at Honeybadger 3, 4, 9, 5.

It's where I talk about kaiju and also, letting my followers speculate on whether,

whether or not I could beat a adult male red kangaroo in hand-to-hand combat.

The answer is no.

Yeah.

Any conclusive evidence so far?

Nope.

I am also best found on Twitter.

My handle is the ice queer, all one word.

I mostly talk about goth stuff, and a whole lot of D and D and how to make D and