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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers 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. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, 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 entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing 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 weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter 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 original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {