Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably 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 interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.
It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.
The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {
