🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, 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 seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {