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

D&D provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, 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 Lower Planes 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 the fallen 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {