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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; 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 introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {