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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 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 Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against 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 divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably 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 Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

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

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {