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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things 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 unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 underdeveloped compared to fiends. 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 Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range 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 entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued 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 nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {