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D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know 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 every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated 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 appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in 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 area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed 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 pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {