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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 craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers 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 side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: 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 general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing 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, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {