Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (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 “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate 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 deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed 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 understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {