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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel 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 Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly 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 just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen 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 victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of 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 creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve 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 also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {