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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements 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 been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; 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 appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms 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 faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic 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 expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn 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. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing 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, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {