Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal 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, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse 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 “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
