🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 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, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general 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 faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being 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 celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {