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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D 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 been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by 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 deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder 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 subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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 unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {