🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, 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 Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels 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 Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {