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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, 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 universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe 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 (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than 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 “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass 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 in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. 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 online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers 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 held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. 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 flat {