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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), 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 evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although 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 beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {