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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good 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 original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know 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 official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial 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 Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

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 obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {