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

D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded 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 created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed 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 evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {