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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince 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 (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels 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 engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. 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 massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial 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 powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {