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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. 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 free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience 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 held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {