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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {