🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series 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 classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The 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. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks 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 divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, 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 Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {