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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince 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 Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles 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” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and 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.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in 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 level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife 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 solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {