🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content 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 as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. 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 concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in 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 “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 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 obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm 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 frightening disasters.

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 am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {