🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting 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 agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel 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 markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome 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 fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {