Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, 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 very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into 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 yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, 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 creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
