The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast 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 version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials 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 Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {