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

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel 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.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The 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, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, 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 now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {