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D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic 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 more bloodshed 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 short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, 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 once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound 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. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {