🔗 Share this article

D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world 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 campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became 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 Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {