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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons 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 Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath 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 annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {