Dungeons & Dragons is a weird creative space. In theory, it provides a white canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also has a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds have a hard time trying to unshackle themselves completely from this massive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”
Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.
A brief history of celestials in Dungeons & Dragons
Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angles from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.
In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.
Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started on the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.
It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, 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 lot of directions without losing their unique nature.
How Critical Role Campaign 4 redefines celestials
Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?
Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral.” They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.
It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.
The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.
Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’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 new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat holy soldiers we get from every other D&D setting. I hope we get to see more layers to the madness caused by the murder of their gods, and that we’ll get to meet celestials who are more than just mindless death machines.
Introducing a new campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons usually results in new locations, NPCs, spells, magic items, feats, and subclasses. It’s hard, however, to bring about meaningful additions to the general lore of the game. The cosmology of the planes and the creatures that inhabit them have always been a major pillar of D&D lore, so I’m curious to see if Aramán’s brand of celestials will stick around for a long time
