🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast 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 interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {