The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian 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 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {