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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like 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 even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings 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 spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings 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. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity 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 mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {