🔗 Share this article

D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. 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. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse 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 kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {