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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, 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 mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, 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 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 conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial 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, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {