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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive 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 Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series 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 not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue 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 once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {