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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) 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 appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity 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. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {