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

D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the 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 look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {