🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include 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 demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {