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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {