Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears 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 entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures 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 magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support 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 include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
