Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Fixed The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy 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 roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {