As a longterm fan of both Critical Role and Dimension 20, I've been keeping up with CR's fourth campaign, with its new world and new DM.
Brennan Lee Mulligan likes to weave complex mysteries in his campaigns - more or less every Dimension 20 is a mystery for the players to solve amidst all the monsters. While I think Matt Mercer's style has certainly contained mysteries, I think that the idea of investigating and discovering what the bad guys are doing is less of an emphasis than simply trying to survive their plots and bring the fight to them.
The broad goal of the extended party (meta-party?) in Campaign Four is to subvert the power of the Sundered Houses, noble families whose nobility is kind of defined by their sorcerous capabilities, and who have sought to hold ultimate power within the world after the death of the gods. Arguably "noble" is underselling them, as they occupy a position higher than, say, King Augustus "Gus" Valian of Timmony (who seems about the best-case scenario for royalty - someone who was lost as a child and grew up among the common folk, and only discovered royal lineage in adulthood, but has retained his "man of the people" values).
The houses, Halovar, Tachonis, Einfasen, Royce, and Cormoray, are each associated essentially with a different source of magical power and creature type in D&D terms - Halovar with Celestials (though eyebrow-raisingly, also fiends - something that I'll be focusing on mostly here,) Tachonis with Undead, Einfasen with Giants, Royce with Fey, and Cormoray with Elementals.
I don't have any new evidence for this, but I think it's notable that Azune, Luis Carazo's Paladin/Sorcerer, speaks a native language we now know to be Araman's version of Draconic, and that the only other Sorcerers we've encountered have been members of the Sundered Houses. Not only do I guess that Azune's Sorcerer subclass (not sure if he has one yet, as I think the party is only level 5 currently, and he might have put 3 levels into Paladin) is Draconic, but I do wonder if there's some "lost sundered house" that he belongs to that had the power of dragons.
But let's talk about a different Sundered House: Specifically, Halovar, and specifically, the house matriarch, Yanessa Halovar.
Yanessa is, pretty explicitly from the audience's perspective, a conwoman. Not only did Wick come into the campaign falsely labeled as a Cleric (because Wick thought he was,) only to turn out to be a Sorcerer (evidently a Clockwork sorcerer rather than Divine Soul, a I'd guessed. Not sure what to make of that other than just that Divine Soul hasn't gotten a 5.5 update yet,) but I noted that the voice that Yanessa uses with family is a decidedly working-class one.
While I had perhaps thought that this was just Mulligan's way of showing duplicity, the idea that Mulligan, famously an old-school leftist preaching working class solidarity, would invoke the trope of using lower-class accents to denote wicked and villainous characters seemed unlikely.
So, in the most recent episode, we got another little detail that seemed pretty important:
After Hal puts on his play Kotherai without making any of the Candescent Creed-mandated edits (that would have turned it from a stirring tribute to the proud history of the orcs rising up against their oppressive creator god into a piece of anachronistic Creed propaganda,) Yanessa shows up at his home to threaten him.
As part of her threat, though, she puts on a false face of civility and makes him breakfast with his own food in his own kitchen. And Hal notices that the food is cooked expertly - a stark contrast when Aranessa Royce, Hal's once-sister-in-law, tried to cook and was an utter disaster because, as a member of a Sundered House, she had always had cooks to prepare her meals.
The very strong implication here, I think, is that Yanessa was not always a member of such an august house. But how did she become the head of one, in that case?
Well, it could be as simple as the idea that she married into it. But if that were the case, it seems strange that she would be the family's leader. While she's worked hard to redefine House Halovar as simply the stewards of the false religion she's cooked up, the basis of their power is that family history.
We know that they have a celestial locked away in their family estate, from which the Filament that fuels their Luxes' powers (and Wick's... maybe?) is harvested.
But Yanessa is not a sorcerer - in an act of intimidation and maybe frustration, she shatters two mugs of Hals that were made by his daughters with Eldritch Blast, a spell only Warlocks have access to.
We also know that the demons, like Tyranny, who have been pledged to serve the Candescent Creed, are not, of course, actually reformed, but simply there as part of a contract with the demon lord K'sharavi (Tyranny's "dad"). I think the demons are more complicated than just "evil," (I think that Tyranny is a reskinned Tiefling, and they retain the concept of a "virtue name." Tyranny believes wholeheartedly that there must be a strong tyrant to lead, but wants someone as kindhearted and goodnatured as Wick to embody that role - a kind of extreme lawful position. (Ok, parenthetical inside a parenthetical, I have thoughts about how you can think of law as institutionalist and chaos as personalist, in which case this would actually be the chaotic position, but I'll set that aside for now).)
So, presumably, Yanessa is a Warlock, and might have K'sharavi as her patron. But is there something deeper going on?
See, Warlock powers are great, but making deals with demons and devils often involves some life-transforming change - the powers could be just a means to accomplish that. So here's my big theory:
Was Yanessa just a common woman before all of this? We're told the Halovars were originally the priests of Tonsul, the human-aligned god of the sun. But what if she's not actually a Halovar at all? What if the Halovars were all killed off, and Yanessa came with the claim of being the House's last scion (this is admittedly even bigger than my initial pitch, so let me get back to that)?
What if she sold her soul for power and influence, to become a high aristocrat of the Sundered Houses, to escape what she at least saw as her wretched state of poverty and irrelevance?
We know that Wick is an Aasimar - though we're not totally clear on whether he's truly directly descended from the celestial in the Halovars' basement or if this is the longterm effect of being pumped full of Filament (I'm leaning the former).
But it is really interesting: if Azune is secretly a member of a lost Sundered House, or at least some equivalent thereof, it does mean that these families may not be as immutable as they'd like us to think.
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