The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range 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 evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, 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, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy 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 yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {