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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “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 Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became 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 “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

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 ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth 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 assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, 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 gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {