Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature
D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves 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, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures 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, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. 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 setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in 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 priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once 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 initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
