🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against 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 individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, 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 evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became 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 seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {