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

D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, 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 the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials 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 Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, 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. 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 (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply 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 screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, 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 loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {