Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic 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 angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and 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 markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos 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 engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god 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 slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
