Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called 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 creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. 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 after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity 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 fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
