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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. 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 universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, 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 Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM 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 ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained 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, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, 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 stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {