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

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {