Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster
Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal 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. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.
It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings
Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, 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 occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
