🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue 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 gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {