🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential 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 entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. 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 Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict 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, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {