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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant 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 thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced 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 lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship 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 mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 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 terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {