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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as 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, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit 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 help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection 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 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 underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder 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 don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity 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 killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {