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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as 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 specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; 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 new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and 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 notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {