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

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel 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 servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot 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 seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {