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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his 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 take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on 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” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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 fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information 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 Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight 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 still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence 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 eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos 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 {