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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {