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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content 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 thanks to the original settings 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 longtime fans of Mulligan 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: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable 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 broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able 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 massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane 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 current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {