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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; 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 presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, 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 D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve 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 just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, 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 loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {