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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than 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, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past 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 went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {