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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by 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 (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {