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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when 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 game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity 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 the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {