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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative 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 included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (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 unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained 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, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {