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D&D provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared 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 religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen 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 arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {