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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos 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 mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum 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 servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings 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 quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {