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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas 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) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {