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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen 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 fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy 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 looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided 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 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting 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 Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {