Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names 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 religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour 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 giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {