Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons
Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, 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 belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal 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, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.
It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.
It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.
Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
