Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made 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 at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {