🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult 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. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms 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 faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, 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 independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM 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, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption 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 casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {