Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it 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 looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.
The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
