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

D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of 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 “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, 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 Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar 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 huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {