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D&D presents a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen 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 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 hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much 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 bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd 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 god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {