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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons 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 Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel 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.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of 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 gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as 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 interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity 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 the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {