The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot 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 deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
