🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, 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 Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {