Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos 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 interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists 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 losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {