🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels 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’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, 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 general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {