Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons offers 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. Yet, D&D 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 universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted 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 priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.
The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
