🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world 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 (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions 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 (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {