🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, 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 Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world 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 followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, 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 tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, 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 terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {