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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd 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 once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” 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. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {