Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit 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 belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers 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 engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
