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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel 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 Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The 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, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {