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D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The 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 mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities 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 servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. 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 “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued 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 campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {