🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. 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. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures 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 terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {