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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and 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 less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers 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) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being 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 Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {