The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian 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 magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of 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 world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. 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 greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated 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 gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” 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 takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. 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 security after death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy 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 mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
