Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs 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 general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities 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 serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
