Critical Role Season Four May Have Fixed The Most Problematic Dungeons & Dragons Creature

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel 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 Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably 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 infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {