🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) 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 specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil 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. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. 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 more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated 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 seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation 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 monstrous celestials to the flat {