The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world 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 (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of 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 the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series 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 celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound 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. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {