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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much 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. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {