🔗 Share this article

D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, 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 loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {