Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although 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 interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.
The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
