The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” 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 angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out 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 interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness 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. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned 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 seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates 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 harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {