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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: 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 widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, 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 led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure 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 huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {