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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks 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 Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) 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 “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, 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 help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

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 impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {