Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things 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 thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness 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, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, 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 shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
