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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, 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 “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 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 the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, 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 Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials 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 Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {