Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
