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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse 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 fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {