Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents 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. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times 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 gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s 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 celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse 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 “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained 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. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. 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 one-dimensional {