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

Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “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 the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: 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 aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {