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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 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 the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, 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 called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {