Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature
D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, 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 lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #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 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage 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 good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum 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 servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. 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 after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.
The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
