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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. 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 elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, 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 servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains 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. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, 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 narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys 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 spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign 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 fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {