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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist 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 serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with 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, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {