The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (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 “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, 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 led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {