The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. 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 celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The 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 hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {