Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free 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 ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
