🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the 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 in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks 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 problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted 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 “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {