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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {