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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit 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 support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons 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 celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {