🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

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 few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The 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 more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {