Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
