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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {