Critical Role Campaign 4 May Have Resolved The Most Problematic D&D Monster

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, 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 help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {