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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, 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, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator 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, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support 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 encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’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 Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {