Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Celestials in D&D
Demons and devils (often called fiends) 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 were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented 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 lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
