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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the 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 ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. 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 implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (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. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {