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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “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 created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. 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 etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors 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 that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague 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 seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {