The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good 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 Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The 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 more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, 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 in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {