🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; 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 appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past 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 deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {