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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” 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 its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose 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 prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {