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

D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials 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 appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue 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 close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable 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’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being 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 loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {