Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief 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 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.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
