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

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” 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 angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed 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 gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded 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 beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of 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 official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {