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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel 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 madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {