Critical Role Season Four Could Have Resolved The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels 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 magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. 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, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (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 understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy 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 happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret 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 safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {