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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general 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 deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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 markedly underdeveloped 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 more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, 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 happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, 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 became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity 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. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {