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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles 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” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. 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 “grandfather,” a fearsome 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. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. 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 now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {