Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {