🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold 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. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate 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 (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity 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 the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {