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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage 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 creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {