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D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder 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 creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, 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 celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {