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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players 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 rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made 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 battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel 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 ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. 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 blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {