Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster
D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The 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 side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. 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 fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with 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 killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
