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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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 crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared 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 truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials 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 masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The 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. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: 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 losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple 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 mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {