Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general 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. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {