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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, 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 celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures 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 Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen 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 victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {