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

D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms 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 belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and 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 underdeveloped 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 the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin 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 storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {