The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History 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 required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, 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, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {