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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, 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, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials 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 angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good 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 happens after the deity who made 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 central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {