Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures 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 appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks 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 divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound 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. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal 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 summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
