The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. 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 gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar 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 massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {