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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {