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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian 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 introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity 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 make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {