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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world 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 (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 Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious 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 chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of 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 beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted 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 Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {