The Latest Critical Role Season Four Could Have Fixed The Most Problematic D&D Monster

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels 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. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. 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 fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. 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 “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {