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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe 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 (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 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 D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from 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 lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists 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 spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {