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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe 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 world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents 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 riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass 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.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd 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 occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world 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 currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane 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 loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {