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

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms 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 specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if 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. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting 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 divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. 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 “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {