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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter 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 unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains 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 belief of their god 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 world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, 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, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {