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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness 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 dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {