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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM 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 really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 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, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities 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, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range 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 free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {