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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos 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 interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {