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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans 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 take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured 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 wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms 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 deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means 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 able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {