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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise 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 killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to 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 cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {