Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection 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.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, 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 Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, 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, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
