Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed My Least Favorite D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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 setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, 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 Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and 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 underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered 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. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing 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 led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {