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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys 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 spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” 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. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest 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 seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {