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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials 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 show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced 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, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, 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 creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, 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 transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {