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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the 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 less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {