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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” 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 Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify 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 Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. 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 one-dimensional {