Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, 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 belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past 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 celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned 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 area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
