Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era 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 left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also 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 divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
