Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

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 “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {