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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background 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 angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms 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 once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot 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 monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {