Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” 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 biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons 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 that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings 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 quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history 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 celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.
The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. 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 security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
