🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 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 hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes 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. Famous examples include 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 notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder 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 don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy 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 appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {