Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms 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 faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric 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 taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, 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 loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {