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D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances 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 Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The 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. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

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 good that smite evil in all its forms 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 once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate 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 (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {