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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses 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 wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {