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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. 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 Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. 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 creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, 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 get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of 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 devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, 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 aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {