Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar 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 good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. 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 appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar 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 madness permeating the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
