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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan 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 classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the 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 less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, 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 consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {