The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include 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.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances 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 independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
