🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted 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!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created 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 make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” 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 cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {