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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. 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 “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret 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 following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {