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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit 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 support 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 encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much 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 antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. 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 ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {