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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, 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 lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his 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 truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles 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 sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil 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 unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, 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. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {