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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble 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 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 do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal 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 when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel 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 of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {