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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, 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 create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness 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 weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply 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, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {