Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by 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 identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include 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.
Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: 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 general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting 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 ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now 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 shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
