The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much 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 (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {