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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of 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” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. 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. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {