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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures 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 creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: 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 many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding 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 cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {