Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster

D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present 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, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, 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 Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, 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 monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

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 powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament 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 safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {