🔗 Share this article

D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate 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 support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the 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 angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident 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 tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {