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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions 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 Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents 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 essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast 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 version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. 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 not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings 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 (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying 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. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint 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 obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {