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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative 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 world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; 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 appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. 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 appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {