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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {