🔗 Share this article

D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts 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 worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show 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 its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {