Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Celestials in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
