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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy 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 looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign 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 pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity 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 the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {