Critical Role Campaign 4 Could Have Resolved My Least Favorite D&D Monster

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach 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,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, 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 first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms 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. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {