The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, 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 Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {