Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially 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 “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning 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 storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal 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 come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
