🔗 Share this article

Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {