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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 in contrast to fiends. The chaotic 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 interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {