Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know 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 felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, 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, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience 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 terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel 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, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
