The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material 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 cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds 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 devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), 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 Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated 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 still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {