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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan 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 take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game 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 demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption 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 misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. 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 {