🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence 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 went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted 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 “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {