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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. 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 “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms 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 god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed 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 online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made 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 make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse 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 “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {