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

Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking 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 “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder 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. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: 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 quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls 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 Dungeons & Dragons. 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 flat {