🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle 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 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 gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian 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 presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel 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.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding 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 obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {