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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” 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 world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials 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 general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet 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, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {