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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation 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 celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing 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 good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {