Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle 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 familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith 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 Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained 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. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
