Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially 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 introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support 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 encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal 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 deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy 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 “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity 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 fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, 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 screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
