The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The 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. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed 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 after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {