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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM 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 great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos 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 one-dimensional {