🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons 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 the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. 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 the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {