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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” 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 biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {