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D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration 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 gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon 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 hold out for 1982 and 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, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen 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 markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {