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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the 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 compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, 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 celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling 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 Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {