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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

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 show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and 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 where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors 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. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one 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 gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound 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. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level 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 celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. 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 {