Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel 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 notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.
It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials
Honestly, I understand: 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 widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.
The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.
Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {
