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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than 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, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, 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 support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game 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 demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness 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. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings 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 concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {