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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall 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 support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {