Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. 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 setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM 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 deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
