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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. 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 wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {