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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {