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

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements 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 original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” 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 biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past 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 were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed 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 arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {