Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded 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 beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
