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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince 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 setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as 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 compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals 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 formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {