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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, 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, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {