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D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed 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 seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {