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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers 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 interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances 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. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings 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 quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs 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 center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel 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 campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {