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D&D offers a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle 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 close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary 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 bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {