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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured 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 the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd 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 once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial 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 lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {