Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage 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 good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it 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 safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {