Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”
The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.
Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.
In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.
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 stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.
To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?
Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.
It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending 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 called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.
The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.
Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {
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