Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although 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 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. 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 creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists 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 lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to 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 the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
