Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms 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 deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded 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 divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
