The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the 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 look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed 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 arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {