Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of 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 world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if 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 do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. 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 ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
