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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm 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 following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {