Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants 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 Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances 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. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {