The Latest Critical Role Season Four May Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, 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 happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {