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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

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

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, 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 support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version 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 short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

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 impressive, but they also get cheesy 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 happens after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {