🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things 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 due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {