Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
