🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 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 the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness 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 distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue 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 have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences 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 destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {