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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation 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 celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, 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 distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest 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 able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {