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

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms 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. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos 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 one-dimensional {