Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster
D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.
The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal 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 Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, 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 Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?
Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.
The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {
