🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious 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 less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities 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 servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening 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 is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {