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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. 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. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. 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 more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {