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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, 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 annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

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 fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {