Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, 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 “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize 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.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd 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 god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

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 powerful Solar 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 obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {