Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called fiends) 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 specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know 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 felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, 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 happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
