Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal 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 priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
