🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, 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 the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination 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 horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {