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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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 Aramán (the world 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 (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to 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. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident 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 fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, 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 address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {