Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
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 angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold 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 include Lumalia and 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.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder 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 do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy 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 the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar 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 corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
