🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although 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 interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared 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 more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. 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 angels from the Bible received less attention. 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 appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {