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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of 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” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures 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 sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {