🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic 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 more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict 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 simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being 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 interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. 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 safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {