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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of 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 free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: 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 consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. 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 massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {