The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

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

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {