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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as 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 “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. 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 close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel 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 markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided 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 concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight 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 terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {