The Latest Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, 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 bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to 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 became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {