Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” 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 fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’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 new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {