Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen 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.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity 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 chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign 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 terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
