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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, 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 Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos 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 subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately 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

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question 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 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial 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 lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {