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

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, 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 became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {