The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by 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 (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version 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 celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. 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. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became 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 kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {