Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general 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 support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The 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, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if 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 do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists 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 sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.
The taint seen 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 pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {
