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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil 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 unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness 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 a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination 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 flat {