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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. 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 interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to 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 campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’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 this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {