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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” 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 unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on 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, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal 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. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {