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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of 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” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature 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 {