The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content 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 wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight 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 “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity 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 obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {