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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than 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 “Monster Spotlight” article 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 first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped 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 interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end 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

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, 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 setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience 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 “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {