🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive 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 setting created 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 (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time 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 game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. 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 limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, 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 aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {