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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures 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: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able 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 humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in 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 evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {