Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against 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 close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, 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 happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided 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 concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
