The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range 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 divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary 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 entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {