🔗 Share this article

D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords 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, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings 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 much more freedom: They have established masters (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 sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen 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 arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {