🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D 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 “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious 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 angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination 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 {