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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements 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 due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While 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 traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials 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 handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence 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 beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. 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 {