Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, 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 gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
