🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article 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 first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption 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 pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {