Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information 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. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity 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 divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {