Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {